Slight decline in expired debts

The total volume of citizens’ expired debts to the tax authorities declined slightly in November compared to the month before, data from the Independent Authority for Public Revenue showed on Thursday.

This reduction is mainly due to the fact that a number of old debts have been written off as impossible to collect.

Data show new tax debts of 646 million euros were created in November. There was also an increase in the number of debtors that month.

Against the backdrop of the program for settling debts in up to 120 tranches, the positive news is the slowdown in the creation of new expired debts, as new debts had amounted to 801 million euros in November 2018.

New debts are deemed to be those created over the course of the same year – i.e. from January to November 2019: They amounted to some 6.5 billion euros, far below the amount recorded a year earlier, while 4.7 billion euros was collected from other expired debts.

IAPR statistics revealed a rise in the number of taxpayers who suffered forced collection measures, such as confiscations, in November: In the January-November 2019 period, 1.244 million taxpayers were subject to such measures – i.e. almost one in every three state debtors.

Total overdue arrears to the tax authorities came to just under 105.43 billion euros at end-November, down 0.53 percent from end-October. Almost a fifth of that – i.e. 20.15 billion euros – has now been labeled non-collectible. Another 6.5 billion euros of debts has entered arrangement plans, while a total amount of 1.08 billion euros is in a state of suspension. Therefore the actual sum of expired debts came to 85.27 billion euros at end-November.

The number of debtors amounted to 4,239,724, up 0.8 percent from end-October and 0.93 percent higher than end-November 2018.

The majority of the new debts in November concerned value-added tax arrears (279.49 million euros), property taxation (145.9 million euros) and income tax (133 million euros).