ECONOMY

Tens of thousands of taxpayers miss submission deadline

The Finance Ministry’s electronic portal for taxpayers, TaxisNet, will reopen on Thursday to start receiving income tax declarations from the 50,000 to 80,000 taxpayers who missed Monday’s deadline. The website closed on Tuesday and the ministry provided no additional extension, as it had also warned.

Sources said that the General Secretariat of Public Revenues issued an order to the General Secretariat of Information Systems (GSIS) for it to reopen the system as soon as possible and for fines to be imposed in cases of late submission.

Most taxpayers who missed the deadline had authorized accounting firms to prepare and file their tax statements. However the heavy workloads of accountants and tax experts prevented many from submitting all their clients’ statements in time. Subsequently it is taxpayers and not accountants who will face the fines and other consequences that late submission entails – i.e. a 100-euro fine and the loss of the exemption of the amount collected in receipts from the taxable income of salary workers and pensioners.

According to a Finance Ministry statement, 276,000 statements were submitted on Monday, bringing the total to 5.81 million. Against expectations the electronic system managed to handle the huge load. Some 99 percent of taxpayers have now filed their declarations following the two-week extension made to the original June 30 deadline.

Statistics on the flow of the statement submissions showed that:

— A total of 78 taxpayers filed their declarations on the first day of submissions, March 20, while about 276,000 did so on the last day.

— One in every five taxpayers submitted their income details in the last week.

— Six out 10 taxpayers posted their declarations in the last month of the four-month period.

— Nearly 2.4 million taxpayers will be asked to pay additional taxes of approximately 3.5 billion euros.

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