The time of truth has come. The time of financial and economic truth. Greek Finance Ministry will collect all possible and impossible information from citizens via data that banks, private clinics, private schools, insurance companies, utility and telephone companies will send to it.
By March 31st 2014, all these will be transferred to the Finance Ministry that will double check whether they money you spend is covered by the money you claim you have and declare to the tax office. The data refer to expenses done during 2013.
Furthermore, all businesses, employers, private and public companies, and pension funds, should send transfer to the Finance Ministry all data about salaries and pensions and incomes from the self-employed.
The aim, among others, sounds simple:
to identify ‘hidden swimming pools’ when the water bills are above 1,000 euro.
to identify off-shore bank accounts, when a credit cart holder withdraws money from a credit institute outside Greece.
to identify suspicious sources of amounts over 15,000 euro. (details in Greek here)
I suppose huge electricity bills would prove of non-stop parties and huge phone bills of ‘suspicious conversations between tax evaders’ or maybe love-sick individuals.
No, I have no idea, whether tourists will have to make a tax declaration in Greece or the Greek Finance Ministry will ask them to carry their tax declaration with them, when they visit our otherwise beautiful country….
According to my humble opinion, the Finance Ministry is going to load and overload its data banks with millions of garbage, because a) the large amounts of hidden money will remain hidden, b) there are still ways to bypass the official channels. I wouldn’t know that money from drug trafficking, for example, and other criminal acts would go through a bank….
But, of course, there could be cases of households that declare zero income due to unemployment but pay their bills with the money they had borrowed from relatives and friends. These criminals who make the impossible possible, i.e. to continue living without money, they should be brought to justice and get heavy fines, right?
In Middle Ages they used to label them as ‘witches’ and other ‘devil-ridden creatures’….
