The Greek Finance Ministry and the troika are looking into a plan to exclude self-employed workers with a low turnover of earnings from paying  a 42% value added  taxes (VAT). Athens wants the level of earnings of the self-employed taxpayers who are exempted from VAT to be at 10,000 euros so that only 400,000 freelancers are affected, whereas Troika is seeking for freelancers earning under 25,000 euros per annum to be included.

The measure on the table had been previously discussed with Horst Reichenbach, head of the EU’s Task Force to Greece, in 2012, but it had remained on the drawing board. Both the coalition government and the troika agree that Greece is one of the few EU countries that hasn’t implemented such a measure and it is hoped that it would take effect by January 1, 2015.

Supporters of such a measure stress that 210,000 people obliged to pay VAT (one in five) have a zero level of earnings and receive VAT returns worth 112 million euros per year. The cost of the government checking the validity of low-level self-employed earners would be too high to fund.