Most Greek Businesses “Criminal” – Says Greek Newspaper

An article in Ekathimerini today is typical of the type of government propaganda that is wide spread in the Greek media at the moment

Here is the article and it is by no means an isolated example

Over half of firms break law

Three in every five enterprises inspected by the Financial Crimes Squad (SDOE) this summer were found in violation of regulations, according to the squad’s director of Accounting Inspection Planning, Nikos Lekkas.

Lekkas told Vima FM radio station on Friday that “SDOE performed checks on 318 targets. The violators came to 195, which is a 61 percent rate, with a total of 900 violations.”

Lekkas added that SDOE is now turning its attention to the payment of value-added tax and that by the end of the year all inspection directorates will be operating with an online system.

“There is a monitoring system that SDOE has currently undertaken on a trial basis, that oversees checks in Attica, Thessaloniki and the rest of Macedonia. By end-October those three branches will be operating online, too, using laptop computers.

“We are also expecting all of our branches to be operating that way as of January 1st, 2012,” the chief inspector estimated.

Despite the fact that the only way Greece can pay back it’s debt, despite the fact that the only way Greek public workers can get paid is if the private sector is profitable the mainstream media in Greece continues to accuse the private sector of criminality.

The Greek government openly calls the majority of Greece business criminal enterprises and yet at the same time they expect the private enterprise to pay constantly increasing taxes to subsidise the overstaffed public sector and to get the Greek government out of the hole it has dug itself into.

I know of no other country on earth that treats it Golden Goose with such contempt and yet at the same time expect them to do so much.

Let us now look at what pot is calling the kettle black. Earlier this week Athens News carried an article that detailed that there was almost no tax audits in Greece in June 2011.

Here is the article, the original version had much more detail in it than before it seems to have been toned down a little but you can still get the idea.

The country’s 34 biggest tax offices, which receive about 70 percent of total tax revenues, presented almost no activity in June. This appears from figures gathered from the 34 biggest tax offices, posted on the internet by the finance ministry’s general informatics secretariat.

The data concerns the number of preliminary inspections of each tax auditor, progress of such inspections and the promotion of crosschecking. They also concern collected revenues, and the number of confiscations in relation to the number of outstanding debtors.

According to figures, in 28 of the 34 tax offices, each employee carried out less than one inspection. Moreover, the 12 biggest tax offices did not carry out even one inspection. (AMNA)

So first we have an article saying 6 out of 10 businesses are criminal and then we have an article saying that the tax offices carry out next to no inspections.

Going on this evidence if tax inspections were done than maybe the government would not need to increase taxes.

On this evidence it can be seen that the Greek government actually encourages criminality, the Greek government actually rewards criminals and punishes law-abiding citizens. The tax increases effect the honest business owners the most yet criminal business owners are affected much less.

Greece should sort out its tax collection measures before it starts raising taxes.

But let us look at the sources of those article again, the first is from the Greek equivalent of the fraud squad. Given that the police would only investigate businesses that they had reason to believe or had evidence that fraud was being carried out I am surprised that only 60% of the businesses were found to be carrying out illegal activities.

But of course the Ekathimerini article does not point this out in the headline, simply that “over half of businesses break the law”. Honestly, the more I read Ekathimerini the more I think it and it’s journalists are simply an organ of the Greek state and act against the interest of Greeks.

So the next time you read an article about tax evasion in Greece remember that Greek tax offices do next to know inspection and yet the Greek government, some how believe that they know how much tax evasion actually goes on in Greece.

The Greek government has no idea how much tax evasion goes on in Greece because they do not carry out enough inspections.

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