By Chrysostomos Tsoufis

Everything shows that the day that thousands of taxpayers are waiting for is approaching. The information of says that in September the provision will finally be issued which provides for the reward of up to €3,000 for those who report counterfeit incidents receipts through its application AADE Appodixi.

The application has been operating for 11 months – the relevant law was passed in December 2023 – but the whistleblower bonus has not been activated.

Activating the bonus tripped over the issue of finding safeguards to prevent whistleblowers from making public. Especially in cases that may involve fuel with a …smell of serious crime, the achievement of the protection of anonymity is out of the question. However, it seems that the necessary technical and legal processing has now been done to overcome this scope. The activation of the bonus will NOT be retroactive but will concern the successful – from which tax evasion will result – complaints that will be made from the day of publication of the decision and thereafter.

So there will be no immediate benefit for some of the more than 176,000 complaints made so far (54.5% anonymous and 45.5% named).

According to the law, the monetary reward is set at ten times the transaction value based on the receipt issued and for which the complaint is made. However, there is a lower bonus limit of €100, while under no circumstances can the complainant collect more than €3,000 after a successful complaint. If a complaint involves more than one receipt, the bonus will be calculated based on the receipt with the highest transaction value.

The prize money herein does not fall under any category of income and is exempt from any tax, withholding, fee or levy in favor of the State, Social Security Agencies, legal entities under public law or third parties and is inalienable and non-seizable in the hands of the State or third parties, by way of exception of any other provision, it is not bound and not set off against confirmed debts to the State, public law legal entities, local self-government organizations and their legal entities, insurance funds and credit institutions and is not counted against the income limits for the payment of any benefit of a social or welfare nature.

Completing a complaint is a relatively simple process.

The first step is to scan the bar code of the receipt through the application developed by AADE and available in the Google Play Store for Android mobile phones and in the AppStore for mobile phones with IOS software.

Depending on the status of the receipt, the following are displayed:

The receipt has been forwarded to AADE. In this case, the details of the receipt are displayed (cash register number, company VAT number, receipt number, date and time of the transaction, VAT transaction value and in transactions with gas stations, the quantity and type of fuel). In this case, it is checked whether the information displayed in the application is the same as that displayed in the receipt. That is, if the value indicated on the receipt is the same as the value that has been transmitted to AADE. If there is a difference, this means that there has probably been an intervention in the tax mechanism of the business, so that a different amount appears on the customer’s receipt and another, smaller amount is transferred to AADE.

The receipt is declared, but the receipt has not yet been forwarded to AADE. In this case, the date and time beyond which the receipt should have been sent to AADE is mentioned.

If the receipt has been issued before this point in time, the report for non-transmission of the receipt is indicated.

The QR code cannot be read or the cash register is not declared or is not active. In this case, submitting a report to the application is indicated.
If the taxpayer chooses to make a complaint, he must take a photo of the receipt, write the reason for the complaint (in essence, he chooses from a list of reasons) and choose whether to complain anonymously or by name