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Tax officials in Greece are preparing to impose a € 100 fine on citizens who have not taken the receipt when making a purchase. Apparently, this is another desperate measure of the Ministry of Finance to raise funds, since major structural reforms that will reduce government revenue and will not empty the already thin pockets of ordinary citizens are absent. Before the fine, it  was decided that the Greeks should collect receipts to prov, at the end of each fiscal year, what they have spent their money on. Otherwise, their annual income would be subject to an additional 10% tax above the regular income tax.
 
The fine will be imposed when the people refuse to take the primary accounting document, when it was not given with their consent or when they take it, but it does not specify the exact amount of the purchased item. According to the notice, if the citizens pay the fine within 10 days, tax officials will make a 50% discount. Fines for not collecting receipts will be validated initially by a ministerial regulation. A little later, they will become part of a series of laws, which must form a "new fair tax system in Greece," which Evangelos Venizelos has been promising to do from the moment he has assumed the post of Finance Minister last summer.

Initially, the new national system of taxation was to be ready in October 2011. Later it turned out that a series of bills would be submitted for vote before Christmas this year. This week, the Ministry of Finance has announced that the regulatory framework of the new system will be discussed in two parts. More importantly, the most serious problems in the Greek tax system, which greatly complicate the administrative process and collection of revenue in the budget, will be discussed at the end of the first quarter of 2012, after the early parliamentary elections. This means that the extra taxes on income and property will not be cancelled any time soon. Nor will any of the current government undertake to reform the Code of accounting books and data, which largely contributes to the accounting chaos in Greece.

At first, tax authorities are expected to introduce a point system for recording citizens’ violations. Moreover, a series of incentives to pay the penalty amount are entering into force to increase tax collection in regional tax offices. There is an option of paying the fines in 10-monthly instalments of which all but the last cannot be less than € 300. If the fined person decides to pay the amount at once, the state makes a 60% discount. If the person decides to pay it in instalments, each instalment except the first will be reduced by 40% if paid within the agreed period. The extremely high reductions the Ministry of Finance is ready to make mean two things: 1. The fines were imposed not on the base of real criteria for violations, but to meet the amounts set in the budget; 2. Fines imposed in the last two years were not reasonable and the real victims of this tax vendetta are not the real culprits who have been hiding income for decades.

"In Greece, honest and foolish people pay taxes," is the saying often heard in the shadow of the Acropolis these days. This includes those who pay tax fines too. The general discontent is growing stronger because along with all other irregularities, the Ministry of Finance significantly reduces the fines for submitting false or fraudulent tax data. For each unregistered commercial transaction over five thousand euros, which tax officials find during an inspection, the offender will pay 30% of the total amount of the transaction instead of the unpaid VAT. According to the changes that are expected to come into force by the end of the year, the fine for finding unregistered transactions during an inspection may not exceed € 300,000, and if the violation is repeated, the fine jumps to 50%.

While Venizelos, like his predecessor Papakonstantinou, is wondering how to get more taxes from recessive Greece, the names of the "big fish" in tax fraud remain unknown. They are about 6.5 thousand people and every one of them owes the state an average of several million euros in unpaid taxes. According to the latest information, the Ministry of Finance has specified that the initial instalments of the obligations should be paid by November 24 this year, otherwise it would disclose the names of major debtors, then arrests will follow, and fast-track court as the law requires. How much the Ministry of Finance will implement its threat is not yet known.