The government called on citizens who owe the state money to open their pocket books and repay whatever they can, if the owed figure is 201 euros or more, and at the same time get a “haircut” on the overall amount owed.

Some 4.1 million taxpayers owing the state money are promised that the same amount of money they repay will be erased from the total amount which they owe.

This motive of “early repayment” which was announced by Deputy FinMin Nadia Valavani will work thus:

If a citizen owed 5,000 euros of taxes or on extra surcharge of electrical consumption,  up until the 31st of December 2013, (not including VAT or backtaxes) will be able to pay, say, 250 euros in March, in order to have another 250 deducted from the total debt, and thus only having to repay 4,500 euros in 100 installments.

Using the above example, the taxpayer will then also be given a 30%-100% discount on surcharges (according to the amount of installments chosen) and will pay the rest with monthly installments at a minimum of 20 euros per month, unless the taxpayer owes money to two DOY (Public Finance Agency), at which point they will only need to pay 10 euros a month to each, at minimum.

Many taxpayers who may use this system will only need to pay half their debt. Following the aforementioned example, a taxpayer who pays 2,500 euros will have the other 2,500 erased from their debt!

The finance ministry hopes that they will be able to at least receive 20 euros from each of the 3.65 million households and 450,000 businesses which owe a total of 76 billion euros to the state. In theory, if everyone rushes to take advantage of the new system (including repaying taxes owed between 1/1/2014 to 31/12/2014) then the state could end up receiving at least 80 million euros a month, which is at least 720 million in the last 9 months of the year.

Many estimate, however, that a lot of taxpayers will rush to pay over 200 euros (ten times the minimum repayment amount), at which point income from taxation in spring will be multiple times the norm.