Photo: ethnos.gr
Dramatic shortcomings in the mechanism for collecting tax revenue found the Public Administration Inspector General Leandros Rakidzis. Road tax of more than 114,000 cars has remained non-collected since 1995, which is a loss of almost 20 million euro for the public sector. A number of tax authorities have not made any tax audit from 2009 on and have not registered more than 18,000 tax returns, although the people submitted them two years ago. The report on the status of the Greek public administration describes in detail the chaos reigning in the tax services and the examples speak for themselves why the budget revenues are never enough in Greece, despite the ever-increasing taxes.
The long list of pending activities continues with the non-payment of the special tax on property (ETAK), which was in force until 2009. Over 10 thousand people have not paid the old tax yet because the tax authorities have not processed the tax returns in full. Tens of thousands of cases are gathering dust in the drawers of the tax offices, and taxpayers do not know when and how the authorities will consider these long forgotten taxes tax unfairness and they will have to pay a fine because of shortcomings in the activity of the administration. According to Leandros Rakidzis’ report, tens of thousands of decisions for the return of VAT have been found in tax the offices, which is not applicable given the tax returns of the persons concerned.
The most dramatic is the amount of uncollected revenue, which for Athens is 88.85%, for Chrysopouli it is 94%, for the Peloponnesus Pyrgos - 75.95%, and for Larissa in central Greece - 91.5%. According to Rakidzis, the value of uncollected fees, taxes and penalty amounts is unjustified and leads to loss of millions of euro for the state. The tax audits covered only about 94,000 cases out of 302,000 and 17 regional tax offices did not carry out any audit despite the order of the Ministry of Finance. In other words, the tax offices have completed only one of three scheduled inspections and some offices have not considered it necessary to make even a single inspection since the beginning of the year.
The cases subject to a tax inspection are mainly of individual and legal persons who consistently "forgot" to pay the relevant VAT or the income tax, and those who are suspected of evading tax from additional activities. Rakidzis defined the public administration as "seriously ill" and one of the main culprits for this state are local government organizations, hospitals and urban planning services. Corruption in these institutions is an open secret, but no government has managed so far to effectively deal with these problems.
The report describes cases of impunity for violations in the state administration, especially through the period of limitation. More than five thousand abuses in the state administration at different levels are found for 2010 and the Public Administration Inspector General noted that they are 46% more than the cases registered in 2009. Of course, the question remains, how many cases were not registered. According to the report, one third of the cases relate to financial abuse, 13.8% are the cases of "unconventional" application of the urban planning law, about 10% of the cases relate to breaches in health care and 7.9% relate to environmental issues. The violations led to the indictment of 142 government officials, 63 mayors, 62 municipal officials, 48 policemen and 30 deputy mayors.