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...will be difficult. Greece's tax-collection system is an antiquated mess. The state's various financial-information databases are haphazard and fragmented. No single program can pull up all the data about a single taxpayer; without tedious manual cross-checks, there's no way to flag the Kolonaki doctor who is declaring a pittance but living in a multimillion-dollar apartment. So decentralized is the whole system that until recently, Greece's government didn't even know how many people it had on its payroll. (See 10 things to do in Athens...
Tasked with the unenviable job of trying to create order in Greece's chaotic financial-data system is Diomidis Spinellis, a former professor at the Athens University of Economics and Business who was recently appointed secretary general of the information systems for the Ministry of Finance. He's got grand plans for using technology to make the system more efficient - and make it harder for people to cheat. But that's his second priority. "Before we talk about radical undertakings, we have to deal with the basics," he says. An expensive auditing system, for example, has been languishing unused...
...plan released on Jan. 15, that revolution will reduce spending by cutting operating expenses by 10% and freezing wages and new hiring. The plan also calls for an improved tax-collection system and the creation of an independent statistics service, which should make it harder for officials to manipulate data. Parliament has passed a 20% tax on alcohol and tobacco, and other tax hikes are rumored. This worries executives like Doros Constantinou, the CEO of Coca-Cola Hellenic, which sells soft drinks in 28 countries. "An increase in taxes will have an impact on disposable income," he says. "That...
...problems, as Minister Ramesh conceded this week, is that the country's regulatory system lacks the expertise and autonomy required to put decisions beyond reproach. In the brinjal case, for instance, the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee had a clear conflict of interest: it relied on data supplied by the seed developer and verified by panelists involved in genetic engineering research themselves. If a more autonomous panel had found in favor of the Bt brinjal, the government may have allowed its use. Ramesh says the moratorium period on the brinjal's introduction should be used to set up an independent regulator...
...patients, shrinks, HMOs, academics. Patients want their illnesses covered; shrinks need to get paid academics want definitions to be consistent with research - research that is itself uneven. Sometimes, DSM changes can be made on the basis of long-term, peer-reviewed studies. But other times, such gold-standard research data is lacking, and changes must be made on the basis of consensus among clinicians. The process is fraught and confusing, even for those in the middle of it. (See how to prevent anxiety...