No bribes, no inspections
Under the pressure of Greece’s creditors, in the days of the financial crisis, three major pieces of legislation were passed to simplify the way businesses could start their activity. Several years later, local authorities – the ones responsible for most of the inspections – are essentially not delivering on their obligations and inspections are practically non-existent. The reason? The fact that the simplified provisions to declare the start of the business have largely eliminated “financial incentives” for the inspecting authorities, as bribes are euphemistically called.
The philosophy behind the reform was that, instead for applying for a permit to launch a business and then wait for the interminable bureaucratic procedures to progress, businesspeople could declare the start of their activity on an online platform – called “notify business” – and wait for the authorities to ascertain whether they conform to a series of regulations.
After a half-hearted attempt in 2014, under the conservative-socialist coalition government, the left-led SYRIZA government passed the two major bills: in 2016 it codified all the reforms and in 2018 it set out inspection procedures and provided for an electronic platform with about 70 forms to simplify inspections for every kind of business activity. Six years later, this electronic platform “will be up and running very soon,” the current government, in place since 2019, has promised.
Legislation was opposed at every step: in 2014, ministries “neglected” to send their comments; in 2016, a minister was so keen to convince his colleagues not to legislate the reform that he climbed on the table around which cabinet was gathered to passionately argue against it.
But it is municipalities, mostly, who are slow-walking implementation. In their mind, allowing businesses to simply declare their start on a platform robbed them of their essential mission: to deny applications arbitrarily or to take an inordinate amount of time examining them. Of course, if businesspeople were willing to stuff the proverbial envelope, rejections would somehow be overturned and decision-making sped up.
Ministry officials say that, even now, municipal officials ignore, or feign to ignore, the existence of the “notify business” platform.
