Route back to payment plan

The Ministry of National Economy and Finance and the tax administration are providing 215,000 state debtors with the possibility of rejoining the arrangements they have dropped out of, as long as they hurry up to pay all the outstanding overdue installments of their payment plans by April 29.

According to the provision, which is included in the draft law to be voted on Thursday in Parliament, the measure concerns arrangements of 72, 100 or 120 installments or the permanent arrangement of 24 or 48 installments, which have not been missed by an act of the head of the tax office but are in a “gray zone,” as they are neither active nor have they been permanently closed.

Essentially, these are cases that under normal circumstances and based on the legislation should not be in a gray zone, but the supervisor should have proceeded to definitively close the arrangement.

Some tax office directors decided to leave them open, as they were aware of the problems of taxpayers in particularly difficult times. They essentially evaded the narrow meaning of the law by trying to help debtors repay their debts. That means that there are supervisors who enforced the law and threw out of the payment plan those who were late in paying or creating new debts, and other supervisors who have kept the arrangements going.

Based on these, the new arrangement concerns debtors who did not pay their installments on time either due to an inability or due to a system error, or did not recognize a payment as being on time or did not submit income tax and VAT returns during the period when the arrangement was active or created new debt. 

There are also cases where taxpayers have delayed paying an installment, but continue to pay even today, without the money being added to pay off their debt. In this case, too, the debt identification was not deactivated by the registrar. Cases such as the above that were kept “alive” by the tax authorities can be activated if the indebted taxpayers so wish.