By Chrysostomos Tsoufis

With a €120 voucher for their upgrade or €350 for their replacement, the Ministry of Finance and AADE are trying to make it easier for businesses to… make the transition to the fully digitized era.

Businesses are invited to connect 400,000 cash registers with POS online, while 140,000 cash registers of the new generation are planned especially for catering. Voucher applications will run in 2 cycles, the first until May 15 and the second until June 30, the cost will amount to €165m and will be covered exclusively by the Recovery Fund resources.

The aim of the plan, as presented by the leaderships of the Ministry of Finance and the AADE, is none other than the block to tricks with monkey receipts and the concealment of turnover in order to further reduce tax evasion. The intervention will unfold in 3 axes:

CONNECTION OF CASHIER – POS: Businesses with a turnover of up to €100,000 must make the connection by June and the rest by July.

Tax audits have shown that payment by card is not always accompanied by a receipt, some businesses justify the turnover of cards with receipts of other transactions while there are also businesses that use POS that are cleared abroad. The interface ensures that the card payment will proceed only when the receipt is issued by the cashier, while now the POS will not be able to accept “free” transactions, that is, outside the cashier to which it is connected.

NEW TYPE CASH BOXES: By October, approximately 140,000 old ones will have been retired and replaced by new ones that have the ability to store all the amounts in their memory and issue reports that will be sent directly – and not via a computer – to AADE. Legacy cash registers do not store files in their memory, issuing receipts is based on files stored on the computer and there are many ways to bypass the mechanisms.

NEW TYPE CASH FOR THE FOCUS: With the current regime, the cashiers do not record tables or orders, orders are recorded in computer files and not in the cashier, order slips are issued which are then either canceled, without being recorded in the tax memory of the mechanism, or no final receipt is issued, while in retrospect turnover is deleted. With the new machines, the receipt will only be printed by a built-in printer, pending orders (open tables) and pending receipts to be issued will be recorded in the memory while Z is issued only after all tables are closed.

At the same time, the Ministry of Finance seems to be reviewing the framework of tax incentives for electronic receipts. The tax deduction of up to €2,200 enjoyed by taxpayers for electronic transactions with 20 high-risk professional categories (plumbers, electricians, gyms, hairdressers) is recognized as having not brought the intended results. According to an official of the Ministry of Finance, the new framework will be presented within 6 months after the elections, if of course the New Democracy will have won them.