There’s a phrase that, for many years in Greece, sounded almost as normal as asking, “Sugar or no sugar?”
“Receipt or no receipt?”
And usually, a second question followed.
“How much without a receipt?”
€100 with a receipt.
€80 without.
Simple enough.
The customer walked away happy because they had saved €20.
The business owner was happy too, because the transaction had suddenly become… a private matter.
And somewhere in the distance, without ever having been invited into the conversation, was the state.
Which, presumably, wasn’t quite as happy.
If you look at this little everyday transaction more closely, it actually explains a great deal about the logic behind tax evasion.
And no, it’s not because Greeks have some special gene for it.
Is “without a receipt” really such a Greek thing?
We Greeks have a habit of believing that certain things only happen here.
Double parking?
We could make a case for that.
Saying “I’ll be there in five minutes” when we haven’t even left the house yet?
Also a strong contender.
Η φοροδιαφυγή όμως;
Tax evasion, though?
Not exactly.
Cash transactions, questionable discounts, failure to issue receipts and attempts to conceal income exist in Italy, Spain, Germany, the United States and many other countries. Why?
Because wherever there is a transaction, there are incentives.
The seller wants to keep more.
The buyer wants to pay less.
And the state wants the tax it is entitled to collect.
Three players.
Except that sometimes the first two decide the game works better without the third.
The problem starts when both sides benefit
This is perhaps the most interesting part.
Tax evasion is not always the story of a business owner acting alone to hide income.
Sometimes, it is a very simple agreement.
“If we don’t issue a receipt, I can give you a better price.”
One side pays less.
The other declares less.
Win-win.
Except, of course, for the state.
So perhaps it’s more of a win-win-lose situation.
And this is where the issue stops being purely moral.
It becomes economic.
If breaking the rules offers a significant benefit and the probability of getting caught is low, some people will be tempted to take the risk.
But change that balance, and behaviour begins to change too.
And this is where technology enters the story.
There was a time when a receipt could simply… disappear
Let’s go back twenty years.
No myDATA.
No interconnected POS terminals and cash registers as we know them today.
No IRIS.
No digital delivery notes.
No digital customer records.
There were accounting books.
Papers.
Folders.
ERP.
And, of course, that drawer in the accountant’s office that has seen things the rest of us will never know about.
The tax authorities might discover a discrepancy months later.
Perhaps even years later.
Today, things look rather different.
Transactions leave more and more digital footprints.
And digital footprints have an inconvenient habit.
They connect.
myDATA is not just another platform
In 2025, more than 3 billion document transmissions were made through myDATA.
Three billion.
If you tried to imagine all of that in physical folders, we would probably need a bigger country.
But the volume itself is not the most interesting part.
What matters is what can be done with all that information.
Because myDATA no longer stands alone.
There are POS systems.
Electronic invoicing.
Το IRIS.
Digital delivery notes.
Digital customer records.
Suddenly, pieces of information that once lived in completely separate drawers can appear on the same screen.
And that is when the questions begin.
The tax auditor of the future may never walk through the door
We tend to picture a tax audit rather cinematically.
The door opens.
The auditor walks in.
“Good morning. Tax Authority.”
A brief spike in heart rate.
Books, receipts and cash register records are requested.
Except today, the audit may have started long before anyone walks through that door.
Because a system can see:
How much a business purchases.
How much money comes in through POS payments.
What turnover it declares.
How many employees it has.
What operating expenses it reports.
And then it can do something remarkably simple.
Ask:
“Does this add up?”
If the answer is “not quite”, then perhaps somebody should take a closer look.
That is the real shift.
It is not simply that we have more penalties.
We have more dots that can be connected.
And it seems the dots are beginning to connect
The figures for 2025 are revealing.
The Independent Authority for Public Revenue (AADE) carried out 7,671 VAT audits using data from POS systems and myDATA.
In 2024, the corresponding number was 2,801.
An increase of almost 174%.
But that is not even the most striking figure.
Tax assessments resulting from these audits amounted to approximately €2.1 million in 2024.
In 2025?
Approximately €47.9 million.
Something changed.
And it probably wasn’t that tax auditors suddenly started drinking more coffee.
It was the data.
And now for the twist: Greece is no longer doing quite as badly as we think
This is where the story becomes even more interesting.
Ask ten Greeks which country has a serious tax-evasion problem and eleven of them will probably answer: “Greece.”
We do have a certain talent for self-criticism.
But when it comes to the VAT gap, the picture has changed.
The latest comparable European figures put Greece at around 11.4%.
In 2019, it was around 24%.
Almost half within just a few years.
Have we solved tax evasion?
Obviously not.
But something very interesting has happened.
The rules of the game have started to change.
And behaviour has started to change with them.
Because, ultimately, you don’t need to change the Greek
This is where a little game theory comes in.
Don’t worry.
There won’t be an exam at the end.
Imagine someone is considering hiding a transaction.
There is the financial benefit if they do it.
There is the probability of being caught.
And there is the cost if they are caught.
In very simple terms:
Benefit of tax evasion > probability of getting caught × cost of getting caught
If the first side of the equation looks significantly larger, breaking the rules becomes more attractive.
But if the probability of detection increases substantially, the equation changes.
And with it, the decision changes.
The person’s character did not suddenly change.
The incentives did.
Of course, the state cannot rely on more audits alone
This is where we also need to be fair to the other side.
You cannot have an overly complex tax system, constant regulatory changes, numerous obligations, high tax burdens and endless bureaucracy, and then make your only response:
“We’ll add another platform.”
Because then there is a serious risk that what you have created is not digital transformation.
It is simply bureaucracy with a password.
The real solution is much simpler in theory — and considerably harder in practice:
Make it easy to be compliant and difficult to break the rules.
Simple rules.
Stability.
Reasonable tax burdens.
Automation.
Less hassle for those who comply.
And a much higher probability of detection for those who systematically try to remain outside the system.
Perhaps the famous “Greek ingenuity” is really just… maths
We like grand explanations.
“That’s just how Greeks are.”
“It’s our mentality.”
“This country will never change.”
And yet.
The same person who once asked:
“How much without a receipt?”
now pays by card.
Tomorrow, they may pay through IRIS before the bill even reaches the table.
Their DNA did not change.
They did not wake up as a different person.
The environment around them changed.
And that may be the most optimistic part of the entire story.
You do not need to change an entire nation to change economic behaviour.
You need to design the game better.
Better rules.
Better incentives.
Better cross-checking.
And a system in which being compliant is easier than trying to stay invisible.
So perhaps the famous “Greek ingenuity” is not quite as mysterious as we like to think.
A little economics.
A little game theory.
A lot of data.
And because this is Greece…
a glass of ouzo never hurt anyone.
Nikos Karamanos
Οικονομολόγος, Φορολογικός Σύμβουλος | Συν-ιδρυτής και CFO στην AFS
