A fraction of tax fines get paid

Extra tax and fines amounting to almost 1.955 billion euros were attributed by the Independent Authority for Public Revenue (AADE) in 2023 to taxpayers and businesses after audits they carried out, even finding extensive tax evasion in some cases. Of this amount, however, only €305.7 million, or 15.6% of those certified, flowed into the state coffers.

One of the reasons, perhaps the most important, for the low rate of collection lies in the fact that audits of previous years usually do not lead to the desired result and the state does not collect the taxes and fines it imposes. This is as cases from many years pile up for checking and the resulting amounts are particularly large and therefore impossible to be paid by the audited.

For this reason, AADE's instructions to the audit mechanism are that the audits should go back no more than two years. In this way, there...