A delighted Secretary of State for Fiscal Affairs, Paulo Núncio, said today that the recovery of monies owed to the Tax Authority had surpassed €1 billion as at October 25th.
This is the highest figure since 2009 with 75% of the money coming from the corporate sector where business owners had fallen behind on VAT and company taxes, many cases will have been for non-payment advanced corporation tax on assumed, but non-existent, profits.
The state machine has forced €3.5 million per day from unwilling and largely unable debtors using the brutal coercive collection system. In a high proportion of cases the taxes collected have been at the expense of the businesses’ survival.
The Tax Authority has raked in €1,028 million against €872.4 million during the same period last year, an 18% increase.
Much of the insistence on coercive collections, rather than repayment plans and agreed deferrals, has been driven by local Finanças office managers who, along with their staff, financially benefit from coercive collections, and not at all from repayment plans.
This bonus system can fraudulently be misued and has been responsible for driving thousands of otherwise viable businesses to insolvency and their owners to bankruptcy.
