Finance ministry officials are not collecting

The tax collecting mechanism of the country has fallen into paralysis, leading to rampant tax evasion, the non-issuing of receipts, non-payment of VAT and withheld taxes, and the state itself not sending notices to those who have not paid their taxes, while others have paid for 2-3 years now.

If the the Troika auditors came to Athens these days, they would ask for a renegotiation themselves, even from scratch, since during its last quarter Papademos' government did not seek to recover any of the taxes that were agreed on for the first half.

The only State revenue was the hike in property (the last installment of 2011 was received in the electricity bill this year) and the adjustment of old debts with the installment of 100 euros.

Also, the first of the 200,000 ETAK notes of 2009 have yet to be sent - and perhaps will not be sent until the formation of a government - of a total of 1,370,000 that have remained unpaid for years because of mistakes that were made in clearing the real estate tax.

According to information, 100,000 out of the 200,000 are either at zero or less than 27 euros so they do not get collected. The problem lies with issuing the rest of the 100,000 notes, asking homeowners to pay a total of 70 million. It appears that these will get a tax of 700 euros on average, that they normally should have paid by the end of May and without installments.

Rather than collecting these revenues, they are continuously deferred and "until further notice." In April the reduction of revenue through VAT and other taxes had reached 13%. Consequently, if the Troika auditors were to come back to Athens, they would see that all these revenues should have been collected during the 2nd half of 2012 and under conditions of even more severe recession and unemployment. In this case, the government and the Troika would have re-written the memorandum, without much hope for its success.

For the record, the Single Fee for Properties is owed by those who from January 1, 2009, had real estate property worth more than 100,000 euros, in the case of unmarried people, and calculated at an extremely low rate (at only 0.1% of the fair value of the property) compared to subsequent hikes. Under the same rate, married couples pay tax on property of an objective value of more than 200,000 euros.