ATHENS: The Independent Authority for Public Revenue last year confiscated bank deposits of state debtors totaling 124 million euros, according to data that Deputy Finance Minister Katerina Papanatsiou presented in Parliament on Monday.
Over the course of 2016, the tax administration siphoned off the deposits of 188,226 taxpayers with debts to the state. It also conducted 11 property auctions, of which four comprised the debtors’ main residence. Eight of those auctions concerned properties in Attica and the other three were at Pella, in Central Macedonia. The total value of the assets auctioned came to 8.47 million, but their owners’ total debts amounted to 42.7 million.
The authority’s data reveal that the state has resorted to compulsory collection measures for 839,056 debtors in recent years, while another 1.65 million taxpayers are at risk of suffering the same fate. In other words, the state mechanisms are about to get even more serious in debt collection this year as the government has to show a reduction in the expired debts it is owed.
Last year taxpayers created 13.9 billion euros of expired debts to the state, taking the total arrears to the tax authorities and social security funds to 95.3 billion.
