“And this year is a very good year for the income as it was last year and the year before[…] We estimate that we will be close to 4 billion. million more than the target we had” emphasized the Governor of the Independent Public Revenue Authority, Giorgos Pitsilis, speaking to ERT.

On how we have more income, Mr. Pitsilis replied that this has to do with three factors. “A key one is growth, inflation plays its role to some extent and a very big part too is a better picture of tax compliance, more timely payments, card usage and tackling tax evasion[…]».

He added that since 2017 when the VAT gap in the country was 29% we are now at 13.7%. “We still have a way to go when the European MO is close to 7% but there is definitely a steady reduction of the gap over the years which makes us optimistic” he underlined.

“This year the collections from overdue debt are the largest in recent years, he emphasized and added that our fellow citizens and those who do not respond to pay on time in the first year, most of them make the effort to settle a debt and keep it” he said at another point.

Referring to what will apply from the new year for the late submission of tax returns and asked if the fine in this case will come automatically, Mr. Pitsilis said, among other things, that “it will be one of the things that we will have as functionalities, now the fine is imposed, but it does not come out automatically and many times we may delay and send it for a long time[…] so if you want, in the context of our own good operation, we go to a digital process that, together with the late submission, the fine will also be confirmed”.

Asked about a recent case of a liquor smuggling ring, he said “Regarding the recent case that has come to light and which is a great success for the Organized Crime Directorate of the Police, with whom we have excellent cooperation and have excellent writing samples, we there aided this cause. Essentially the Coordinating Operations Center for Smuggling, which is a service that includes the AADE and the Police and the Coast Guard and the SDOE gathers information, processes information and depending on the nature of the case communicates with the appropriate team or the appropriate authority for further information.

Here they came to their attention a business practice within imports, exports to a specific company, then intra-community acquisitions in a specific country, then intra-community acquisitions in another country. There didn’t seem to be any sales in Greece[…] In this case, the information was collected and given to the Police afterwards for the further actions and the work of the police was supported by the customs services throughout the monitoring and we had this very positive result. It is indeed brought on the record and I will be very careful […] to involve an officer of the Authority, who came to us from a transfer two years ago and from what we understand in the provision of information. Well, our attitude towards corruption is specific and crystal clear: there is no room for tolerance.

Anything that comes to our attention takes the path of justice, as we have done with recent cases that have seen the light of day and we will continue to do so and from then on we are also moving forward with a very important organizational transformation in both tax and customs, so that to create the necessary distance between businesses and our executives”.

He further stated “[…] SDOE is and remains the service of the Ministry of Finance. We in our own ranks, precisely to deal with difficult, complex, demanding cases of tax evasion and smuggling, with controls in the field we create a common operational infrastructure so that the special investigative teams we have because we already have teams in the customs and tax authorities that operate on the one hand, to be able to operate now coordinated and with sophisticated tools. We already have an operations room that can coordinate audits, can give remote commands, monitor with drones an audit in the field. So, leveraging all of these tools to the auditors, who are managing the special complex cases.”

“The controls are never enough in any country and I speak with too many of our counterparts, you know. No leader will tell you that the controls we have are adequate. But what we do and have been doing systematically all these years, and that’s why we have this difference now, is that we try to operate proactively. Proactively how? With digital ecosystems like MyData for example, through which we can monitor transactions in real time and this in itself greatly reduces the phenomena, it does not eliminate them, but we are definitely not where we were a few years ago” .