Taxpayers will need fewer receipts
Taxpayers will have to collect fewer receipts than originally thought to qualify for the tax-free allowance. The new tax bill will be partly unveiled next week and is expected to require receipts of less value than the initial amount announced by the government, as Finance Minister Giorgos Papaconstantinou told representatives of various social bodies that the original scheme was not fair. Taxpayers are expected to collect receipts whose total value reaches a specific proportion of their declared income. According to the government’s initial announcements, taxpayers with annual incomes up to 6,000 euros need no receipts, while those earning between 6,000 and 12,000 euros would need to produce receipts equivalent to 10 percent of their income in order to qualify for the full tax allowance. The changes concern incomes between 12,000 and 40,000 euros, with taxpayers earning 25,000 euros now having to collect receipts to the value of just 4,300 rather than 7,500 euros as originally planned. Similarly, those with an income of 40,000 euros will need receipts totaling 8,800 instead of 12,000 euros. The income tax brackets will apply to all categories of taxpayers, with no distinction made for the self-employed, who used to have a lower tax-free threshold at 10,500 euros. The bill will also abolish the Single Property Tax, replacing it with an annual tax of large property, with a tax-free threshold of 400,000 euros. Tax rates will then vary from 0.1 percent to a maximum 1 percent for properties worth over 800,000 euros.
