Tourists Wanted To Crack Down On Greek Tax Dodgers

[Webster]

....what, the Greeks can't cheat anymore? They have to depend on tourists to enforce their tax laws?

(San Francisco Chronicle) ATHENS, Greece (AP) — Greece's proposal to use "non-professional inspectors" including "students, housekeepers and even tourists" to crack down on tax evasion has earned the government wide scorn from political opponents and on the Internet.

The proposal is one of seven reforms described in an attachment to a letter sent by Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis to Dutch counterpart Jeroen Dijsselbloem, who is also president of the Eurogroup — the gathering of the 19 eurozone finance ministers.

Opposition parties New Democracy and PASOK, the coalition partners in the previous government, blasted the proposal as "ridiculous" and legally dubious.

The government hasn't confirmed the leaked contents of the letter, but didn't deny them either when replying to New Democracy.

The reform proposals will be discussed at a Eurogroup session in Brussels on Monday.

Thoughts?

 

[Webster]

...another perspective:

(MSN News) Ahead of Monday’s meeting of euro zone finance ministers, Greece has submitted its latest proposals for reform (paywall) to get money from the creditors that control its bailout. One proposal in particular jumps out: Hiring tourists to get wired up and spy on locals for tax avoidance.

The Greek finance minister, Yanis Varoufakis, says that the “culture of tax avoidance runs deep within Greek society,” and has expanded on a previous proposal to better collect taxes: "To this effect we propose the following: That large numbers of non-professional inspectors are hired on a strictly short-term, casual basis (no longer than two months, and without any prospect of being rehired) to pose, after some basic training, as customers, on behalf of the tax authorities, while ‘wired’ for sound and video.

We envisage that the recruits will come from all walks of life (e.g. students, housekeepers, even tourists in popular areas ripe with tax evasion) who will be paid hourly and who will be hard to detect by offending tax dodgers. The very ‘news’ that thousands of casual ‘onlookers’ are everywhere, bearing audio and video recording equipment on behalf of the tax authorities, has the capacity to shift attitudes very quickly."

Varoufakis even wants money for the rest of the euro zone to do cary out its Stasi-esque policies. As one unnamed euro zone official told the Financial Times: "It’s quite hilarious, if it were not so tragic, that this is what a government in an industrialized country comes up with."

Spying—and using foreigners to do it—should go down well with voters in a country suffering from record unemployment that has lost a quarter of its economy. They elected Varoufakis’s party in the first place to end this kind of humiliation.

Varoufakis hasn’t been doing very well since he was elected as part of a new government vowing to end the austerity that has come with Greece’s bailout. He hardly won any concessions from the country’s creditors in the rest of the euro zone (as Quartz predicted)—the much-loathed bailout continues as before with the same people in charge.

So much for game theory.