So I'm sure everyone is plenty sick of my comments about Greece, but seeing as this is directly relevant to my book, Boomerang (there is a chapter all about Greek tax evasion and their terribly inefficient government), I thought it was a good post for now.
I found a short article in the Economist about a list that has recently been published in a magazine of 2,000 Greek citizens that were holding foreign accounts in Geneva (thereby avoiding Greek taxes). The editor of the magazine claims that the list was in public interest, and that tax reforms have been too scant. The numbers show that 15,000 people had not been reporting these funds to the tax authorities, and the government now plants to collect 2.25 billion in taxes on account of this.
The editor, Costas Vaxevanis has been recently tried (I do not know the results), charged with violating data-privacy, as the list included many elite Greeks. The former finance ministers are terribly embarrassed because they slipped on their duty to do anything about the known evaders. The lists they had seemed to be "mislaid"and then they dropped the matter, but it got into someone's hands (stolen) who gave it to the magazine.
This is the kind of incident that Michael Lewis would certainly have a lot of fun teasing in his book, if only it happened a few years earlier. The article ends reminding us that the EU and IMF are incredibly annoyed at Greece because of how much work they are putting in to put their economy back together when they can't even get their citizens to pay their taxes (A recent study implied that 30 billion euros of tax revenue is ignored each year because of this!)
Here's the link:
http://econ.trib.al/e4370t
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