Greek Government Admits “Cooking the Books”

ekathimerini.com has come out today and said the Greek government is proactively cooking the books to make the economic situation in Greece look “less bad” (my quotes).

Following orders from the political leadership of the Finance Ministry, the general secretary for tax and customs affairs, Yiannis Kapeleris, sent a circular to tax authorities asking them not to pay any salaries or tax returns on Thursday and Friday, putting off all obligations until August 1 or later.

Ministry sources suggest that returns in the last days of every month amount to hundreds of millions of euros, which would make the revenues picture in the first seven months less positive than it was until Wednesday. – If there is a symptom of the incompetency and/or shortsightedness of the people in power this is it.

To state the obvious this is a dishonest act and does not reflect the true financial situation in Greece, which at the end of the day is what got Greece into the sitaution it is in now. ie cooking the books to make the ecnomy look better. Again to state the obvious, it shows how experience has taught the politicians absolutely nothing.

Of course there are other effects of this. The Greek government thinks nothing of playing with people’s personal finances. With this move the Greek government is effectively saying that it is okay to pay their employees when they want. Today is it a 4 day delay but what is next. Maybe Greece can become California where state employess were getting paid with IOUs

And the third aspect of this is, again to state the obvious, that the following reporting period after August 1st will look that much worse. If there was ever a case of robbing Peter to pay Paul this is it. Except in the case the government is robbing from itself.

Dishonesty regarding Greece’s financial position has caused massive damage to the Greek economy. Maybe honesty should be given a chance.

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