One of the regulations that the market had been eagerly anticipating was not included after all in the tax bill submitted to Parliament last week. The regulation concerned improvements to the way the state handles the return of taxes, and has been scrapped at a time when the General Accounting Office of the State said that it has discovered unrecorded state debts in tax returns of 2 billion euros.

This constitutes yet another blow for the Finance Ministry, after a similar case with healthcare organization EOPYY, and is upsetting the program for the repayment of debts to private parties that are now even greater.

The unrecorded tax returns of 2 billion euros (1.2 billion of which concerns value-added tax returns) comes on top of recorded debts of 756 million euros in tax returns by end-October. The sum brings the amount of returns the state owes to Greek taxpayers to over 2.7 billion euros. After the disbursement of the bailout tranche of 34.4 billion euros, the government aims to immediately start the repayment of part of its debts.

 Some 1.5 billion will be paid by the end of the year and some 8.5 billion will have been repaid by the end of March, with priority given to tax returns and to retirement lump sums. Source: Kathimerini