Saturday 3 December 2011

Taxes not collected.....

We hear constantly about Greek people avoiding paying taxes, under declaring incomes etc., but sometimes the government departments do very little to even try and collect taxes / utility bills.
I have become accustomed to having to collect my water bill from the local taverna each year around September. For those of you wondering why it goes to the local taverna and is not delivered to my house like normal mail let us just say "its always been that way, why change it?"...the reply I got when I queried it some years back after not seeing a water bill for four years!  No one told me I had to pick it up at "the pub"!
Well last year it never appeared until mid November, this year its not appeared at all........yet when you go into the water authority offices there always appears lots of staff, oh yes and lots of coffee cups!

The very same thing occurs with car road tax. Despite owing a Greek vehicle over a year I have not received a road tax payment document. I ask you over a year to plan to send these out.........It means of course I have to go to the vehicle registration office in the city, queue for hours to be able to pay for next years tax disc. Failure to pay by January means a fine and that means paying DOUBLE. If I had received a reminder I could just pop into the local bank / post office.

Now I don't want to pay taxes / bills either, but its a fact of life and perhaps government officials actually earned their wages by carrying out there jobs efficiency Greece would have more coffers in the bank.