Internet help sought against tax evasion
ROME — As Italy’s cashstrapped government launches its latest bid to crack down on tax evasion of up to 150 billion euros a year ($192 billion), it is getting a little help from mobilisation on social networks.
Blogs, Facebook groups and mobile apps are all being used to encourage Italians who have long turned a blind eye to rampant corruption to report shops, restaurants, doctors and dentists who are dodging taxes.
“We decided to help raise the level of integrity,” said Edoardo Sera, a 27-year-old IT consultant, who along with some friends recently launched the website tassa. li, which translates as “tax. them”, to report the fraudsters.
The website pulls together the individual reports into a “tax evasion map” and calls for people to boycott businesses that are not pulling their weight.
“Fight evasion by buying only from honest companies and professionals. Find them on our site and help us find others,” said another website, nonevado.it.
The Facebook group “Friends of Receipts” and the website evasori.info have taken an even more aggressive approach, publishing names and addresses.
Public anger against tax evaders is rising as the debt crisis demands ever deeper sacrifices by ordinary Italians, who have been forced to ac- cept three austerity packages worth 80 billion euros in the past year alone.
The challenge is a worthy but daunting one after years of laxity under the long-serving former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, who famously said in 2004: “If I’m asked for 50 per cent, I feel morally obliged to evade taxes.”
Tax authorities last year managed to claw back 11 billion euros but experts say this is only the tip of the iceberg in a country where doctors and dentists often offer their clients a discount if they do not ask for an official receipt.
Berlusconi’s replacement, Mario Monti, came to power in November calling for a radical change to defend “honest taxpayers”.
“It’s unacceptable that workers have to make sacrifices while a major chunk of wealth is not taxed,” Monti has said. Tax authorities have heeded his call, launching a high-profile raid on December 30 on the exclusive ski resort of Cortina d’ampezzo.
Eighty tax inspectors swooped on the town, checking restaurants, bars, luxury stores and the owners of luxury cars.
The checks led to a massive 400-per cent increase in declared turnover from the resort’s businesses compared to the previous season.
Out of 133 luxury cars checked, 42 owners had declared incomes of less than 30,000 euros a year. — AFP GUATEMALA CITY — Retired general Otto Perez was sworn as president of Guatemala, promising to restore order in a country awash in drug-related violence and near the brink of bankruptcy.
Saying a course correction was urgently needed, Perez, 61, vowed to use his four-year term to fight corruption and impunity, put public finances on a sounder footing and restore public respect for authority.
“The change has begun, the change has arrived,” he said. “Today we begin a new mandate with many problems and enormous challenges for the whole of society, but with very good prospects.” But Perez acknowledged the depth of problems facing the Central American country, where half of the 14.3million-strong population lives in poverty, calling it “a nation very near moral and economic bankruptcy.”
Perez replaced social democrat Alvaro Colom, taking the oath of office in a ceremony at a sports complex. — AFP