Majority of Greeks Paid No Income Tax in 2009, Year Crisis Hit
By Marcus Bensasson - Dec 30, 2010 4:06 PM GMT+0100
A majority of Greeks paid no income tax in 2009 when the country’s ballooning budget deficit led to a financial bailout and helped spawn the sovereign-debt crisis, Finance Ministry data show.
In a year when Greece’s fiscal gap reached 15.4 percent of gross domestic product, 66 percent of citizens declared annual incomes below the 12,000 euro ($15,878) threshold for paying income tax, according to data from the Athens-based ministry’s information systems unit posted on its
website.
Among self-employed Greeks, a category that includes many doctors, lawyers, farmers and traders, the proportion of non- payers of income tax was 87 percent, a ratio almost unchanged from 2008, according to the data. The self-employed, who make up more than a third of taxpayers, paid 2.19 billion euros in taxes, or 17 percent of the 13.2 billion-euro total.
Employees and pensioners paid 6.93 billion euros in taxes in 2009, 53 percent of the total, a five percentage-point increase from 2008, the data showed. Only 60 Greeks declared annual incomes of more than 900,000 euros in 2009.
The government estimates the deficit will be 9.4 percent of GDP this year and narrow to 7.4 percent in 2011 before falling under 3 percent by 2014, a condition of Greece’s 110 billion- euro bailout in May from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund. Contagion from Greece’s fiscal crisis has spread to other high-debt euro members such as Ireland, which applied for an EU-led bailout last month.
The Finance Ministry recouped 891 million euros in back taxes through Dec. 24 as part of an amnesty, it said this week.
(Bloomberg)
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