Finance Ministry to present plan for a single set of tax rates for all

The Finance Ministry is set in the next few days to present creditors with the changes it is planning to introduce on 2016 income taxation.

The measures being considered are to decrease the number of income brackets from the present three to two or even one. This would mean that salaried workers, pensioners, the self-employed and landlords could be taxed at the same rates, as was the case in the past. The other scenario provides for a separate set of brackets for the self-employed.

The tax-free yearly income threshold may come to 9,000 euros, in a scenario that also includes several brackets with low tax rates: The first would start from 6-8 percent and the last to 50 percent for annual incomes over 50,000 euros.

The ministry aims to shift the tax burden from the majority to the high and very high incomes, though this will be very hard to attain given that those top brackets constitute a very small number of taxpayers.

Ministry sources note that provisional data show that the self-employed and small enterprises have declared larger incomes for 2015 than in previous years, which is attributed to the increased use of credit and debit cards last year. They add that previously just a quarter of the turnover of the self-employed and small firms was through cards, and this has now reached 50 percent.