Taxpayers must add each receipt or wait till year-end for discount
Unless they’ve been keeping a record of their electronic transactions that count toward this year’s tax discount, most Greeks won’t know if they’ll have to pay the taxman more or get a rebate until they are notified. The government had announced that it would create an application that would allow taxpayers to keep track of their transactions and see how far they had to go before they covered their tax-free threshold, but this plan appears to have been abandoned.
It seems the reason is not due to any technical problems but rather because the focus has shifted to the implementation of other applications that will allow for the interconnection of Taxisnet with the online systems of Hellenic Exchanges and the National Land Register, along with the Labor Ministry’s Ergani hirings database.
Consequently taxpayers will have to do their own calculations as far as their transactions via credit/debit card or through e-banking are concerned to know the precise sum they have spent and whether they need more to reach their tax-free threshold.
Failure to reach the threshold incurs additional tax. That penalty amounts to 22 percent of the difference between the threshold and the amount actually collected.
If they have not kept their receipts or been keeping track themselves, taxpayers will have to wait until the end of the year, when their banks will send them detailed lists of their transactions, to see the precise amounts involved. As a result of this issue, the Finance Ministry has decided to implement the measure only partially, so that taxpayers do not run into any problems. Therefore, the space on the online tax declaration where taxpayers’ expenditures qualifying for the tax threshold are supposed to be appear will be left open, so that taxpayers can add any transactions via cards or e-banking that have not been included in the sum already calculated and posted on the declaration form.
From 2018, tax declarations will require a separate online expenditure sum for each spouse; however, if one spouse’s spending exceeds the necessary limit, it can serve to cover the other spouse’s possible shortfall.
