New tax intervention package almost ready

With the restart of technical negotiations in the Brussels Group the Greek government seeks to finalize a package of interventions in the tax system aimed to boost public revenues without taking any horizontal measures. In this framework, the government is redefining the criteria of tax cases to be inspected in priority by the tax administration in order to strengthen the efficiency of the collection mechanism.

A government council meeting late on Wednesday examined the first tax interventions on which there is convergence with the institutions without reaching any final decisions. At the same time, the Finance ministry is promoting two changes on tax control: first, focusing on cases with big tax collection interest and secondly, launching procedures for identifying non-performing tax debt. Overdue tax debt to the state is currently around 75 billion euros, of which more than 50 billion euros are considered to be non-collected.

The government also examined tax interventions such as offering favorable terms of stating bank deposits held in foreign banks, introducing a lottery measure as an incentive to collect retail sales receipts, introducing a single VAT tax factor, obligatory use of credit/debit cards for transactions over 70 euros in all tourist islands of the country and imposing a higher tax burden on larger incomes.

ANA-MPA