By Chrysostomos Tsoufis

“Dear Mr. Tsoufi,

Once the Greek tax authorities have calculated your tax return, you will be entitled to a tax refund.

To ensure your refund is processed and paid to the correct account, please click the link below to verify your details.

confirmation immediately

We will start processing your return as soon as we receive your details. Please note that it may take up to two days for funds to appear in your account.”

This personalized message certainly didn’t reach just me. And whoever received it, he must, like me, ignore it. The AADE It does NOT need any… green light by the taxpayer to proceed with the tax refund. No additional items are needed. The processes are automatic and with the least possible human intervention.

After the tax return has been settled and if the result is credit, the check is automatically carried out in order to establish whether the taxpayer is tax and insurance aware, i.e. whether or not he has debts to the tax office and the insurance funds.

If the check turns up nothing, the return is completed immediately on a weekly basis.

Priority is also given to those who have not committed serious tax offenses in the past.

If there are only tax debts, offsets will be made – again without requiring approval from the taxpayer – automatically on the first and third ten days of each month.

As far as businesses are concerned, a kind of “white” list has been created which includes those:

  • They have been audited for at least three tax periods and the VAT amounts ultimately refunded did not deviate by more than 5% from the amounts claimed
  • They have not committed any tax or customs violations
  • They have not been identified as suspected of involvement in intra-Community transaction fraud following the application of risk analysis criteria.

The members of the list should also expect immediate crediting of VAT refunds immediately after the online submission of the relevant request.

From this year, however, in order to refund the money, it is required that the IVAN has been declared. But again, if the taxpayer receives an email asking for the IBAN, he should also ignore it. Filling in the IBAN can only be done through the official website of AADE. Even AADE is looking for 130,000 people to return 93 million euros to them.

To date, more than 1.2 million tax returns have been cleared and about 1/5, 21.77%, are credit.

162,127 debt-free taxpayers have already been refunded 34 million euros, about 210 euros each, on average.

For 56,371 TINs, offsets have been run with their debts amounting to 15 million euros.