App helps tax compliance
Thousands of taxpayers have submitted complaints against alleged violations of regulations
Taxpayers play their part in imposing tax compliance by reporting tax evasion or by scanning receipts with their cellphones to verify whether the payment document they received is authentic and whether it has been forwarded to the tax administration.
The bonus instituted by the government, which ranges from 100 to 3,000 euros for those who find a receipt that has been tampered with through the Appodixi mobile app, has contributed to this effort. Already 265,967 citizens have downloaded the app on their phones.
At the same time, some major criminal cases have been reported on the “Citizen Complaints” platform and checks have already started for some of them.
Impressively, complaints in the last month increased by 231%.
In the first two months of its operation, 2,075 complaints were submitted, while in the first three months 6,874 complaints were made, of which 89% concerned cases of tax violations.
The tax office has received the following complaints: 5,759 anonymous, of which 476 were for corruption cases, 102 for customs violations and 5,181 for tax violations; and 1,115 named, of which 153 were for corruption, nine for customs violations and 953 for tax violations. Through the Citizen Complaints platform, the complainant, either named or anonymous, can provide information by selecting one or more of the following thematic categories: corruption-integrity violations; tax violations; customs violations.
Complaints/information submitted through the application are systematically and automatically channeled – depending on their subject matter and content – to the competent auditing authorities for further investigation or inspection, as the case may be. Some cases have already reached the monitoring mechanism.
Particularly popular is the Appodixi cellphone application, through which citizens can scan the receipts they receive and then inform AADE when they find documents that have been tampered with or those not been transmitted to Taxis. So far, 155,794 such complaints have been made.