More delays and red tape for companies’ tax rebates
The General Secretariat for Public Revenues has added one more bureaucratic obstacle to the efforts of cash-starved enterprises to secure liquidity, as a new regulation stipulates that they will have to wait an additional month for their income tax rebates and before that to submit a handwritten application for it at their local tax office.
A circular issued on Tuesday by General Secretary Katerina Savvaidou extends the waiting time for corporate income tax rebates from 60 to 90 days. It also says that companies will not be returned the money they are entitled to unless that have physically filed a request for the amount with their local tax office in advance.
According to sources, the Finance Ministry intends to extend this time-consuming and burdensome system to other areas such as value-added tax rebates.
This decision, meanwhile, comes just days after the European Commission’s Task Force for Greece highlighted in a report that one of Greek enterprises’ biggest problems is securing liquidity.
Nevertheless, state budget data have shown that in the first half of the year tax rebates came to just under 1.56 billion euros, beating the target originally set by the ministry by 96 million euros.
