Word: systemize
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...year-long Ottoman rule over Greece, when people evaded taxes as a form of resistance. Ordinary Greeks point to a more immediate cause. "Everyone cheats," says lawyer Elena Tzanetakou, 29, as she rushes out of a tax office in Athens after filing paperwork for a client. "The system is corrupt and it always has been, so people think, 'Why should...
...roughly half of what he sells - about $17,000 of the $34,000 he takes in every year - and pockets the 19% sales tax he collects on the rest. When he files his income tax return, he declares only the revenue for which he has issued receipts. The system works because further up the chain his suppliers only declare half of what they sell him, and further up still, someone brings many of the goods into the country without paying the full customs duties. So far, Dimitris says, his store hasn't been audited. But when the tax authorities come...
...that will come from new taxes on items such as luxury goods and fuel. But Athens also insists it can raise $1.67 billion in the short term by cracking down on tax evasion. The government has promised a radical reform of the country's complex and inefficient tax system and says a comprehensive new law, which is intended both to simplify the system and to spread the tax burden more fairly, will be presented this month...
...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...