YPEE will see major shake-up
The full restructuring of the Special Inspections Service (YPEE) is one of the objectives of the government’s new economic leadership. The service has been idle for quite some time and needs to become active again, with state coffers requiring even greater revenues in 2009. The lag in the collection of revenue last year was the result of the lack of proper inspection mechanisms, which brought about a rise in tax evasion, particularly the non-payment of value-added tax by companies and freelancers. Sources have said that the special secretary of YPEE, Marios Tsakas, told department heads at a meeting last Thursday that he intended to resign. That means that new Economy and Finance Minister Yiannis Papathanassiou will want to apply his own ideas as far as the operation of inspections is concerned. Changes could stretch across the entire spectrum of monitoring bodies, including the Interregional Inspection Center, which conducts inspections on very large enterprises that have a turnover in excess of 9 million euros per year. YPEE officials called the upcoming changes a godsend, saying that the last few years that the monitoring body had been idle, it had lost its reputation abroad (which led to its change of name from SDOE), while a number of its employees had also departed for other state bodies. The coming restructuring will bring broader inspections of state-subsidized projects in order to better establish the use of European Union and state subsidies. This reactivation of YPEE seems to be essential for the government to realize its 2009 budget targets.
