Greek tax evasion statistics show two different sides of compliance. Greece’s VAT compliance gap was 11.4% in 2023, while the tax administration recorded a 98.29% overall VAT filing compliance rate in 2024. At the same time, tax arrears stood at €109,696.9 million on 1 January 2025, and targeted audit work continued to produce substantial assessed tax.
Contents
- VAT compliance gap
- VAT filing and targeted interventions
- Corporate and personal tax compliance
- Property, payroll, and tax assessments
- Tax arrears and overdue debtors
- Audits, indirect methods, and customs
VAT compliance gap
The European Commission’s VAT Gap 2023 Greece country report recorded €19,756 million in VAT revenue collected by Greece in 2023. The same report measured Greece’s VAT compliance gap at €2,532 million, equal to 11.4% of total VAT tax liability. The compliance gap is an estimate of VAT that was not collected relative to the liability measured for that year; it is not a direct count of individual evasion cases.
Greece’s 2023 VAT compliance gap fell by 1.1 percentage points compared with 2022. The longer comparison was also lower: the gap declined from 24.0% in 2019 to 11.4% in 2023. In the European Commission’s comparison of EU Member States for 2023, Greece ranked 20th for the VAT compliance gap.
The European Commission’s VAT Gap page placed the EU-wide compliance gap at about 9.5% in 2023, corresponding to €128 billion. Greece’s reported 11.4% therefore sat above the EU-wide percentage for that measurement year. The comparison concerns the 2023 estimates reported by the European Commission and should not be read as a ranking of every form of tax non-compliance.
The Greece country report also separated policy-related components of the VAT gap. Greece’s actionable VAT policy gap was 36.1% in 2023. Its VAT rate gap was 18.3%, its national policy-driven VAT exemption gap was 14.4%, and its EU policy-mandated VAT exemption gap was 3.4%. These are policy-gap measures, not additional amounts of proven tax evasion.
| Measure | Greece, 2023 |
|---|---|
| VAT revenue collected | €19,756 million |
| VAT compliance gap | €2,532 million |
| VAT compliance gap as share of liability | 11.4% |
| Actionable VAT policy gap | 36.1% |
| VAT rate gap | 18.3% |
| National policy-driven exemption gap | 14.4% |
| EU policy-mandated exemption gap | 3.4% |
Source: European Commission VAT Gap 2023 Greece country report. EU comparison: European Commission VAT Gap page.
VAT filing and targeted interventions
The AADE 2024 Annual Report recorded 5,743,946 taxpayers liable for VAT registration in Greece in 2024. Of these filing records, 5,627,477 VAT returns were filed on time. The timely filing rate was 97.97%. Total VAT returns submitted reached 5,645,785, producing an overall VAT filing compliance rate of 98.29%.
AADE contacted 116,469 late VAT returns by email or phone during 2024. Following that contact, 18,308 VAT returns were filed. The post-contact VAT filing compliance rate was 15.72%. This measure describes the response to the identified late-return intervention; it is separate from the overall filing rate.
AADE also used compliance actions connected with VAT declarations and digital records. For 2023 Q3, the authority identified 1,706 businesses with blank or zero VAT returns. The resulting action produced €60.9 million of additional taxable outputs, while the output-minus-input tax difference was €1.5 million.
For 2022 Q3, AADE identified 2,968 businesses with missing amounts in zero VAT returns through myDATA cross-checks. After the intervention, 999 of those businesses complied, and AADE secured 4,628 amended VAT returns. That action generated €46.7 million of declared taxable outputs and a €2.1 million output-minus-input tax difference.
These figures describe administrative findings and declared or assessed amounts associated with specific actions. They do not establish that every business identified had committed deliberate tax evasion.
Corporate and personal tax compliance
For tax year 2023, Greece filed 343,431 corporate income tax returns in total. The total included 246,171 debit returns amounting to €7,311.6 million, 22,907 credit returns amounting to €993.9 million, and 74,353 zero returns. The amounts refer to the declared debit and credit return categories in the AADE 2024 Annual Report.
AADE contacted 6,675 corporate-income-tax non-filers for tax year 2022. Of those contacted, 1,423 complied, corresponding to a non-filer compliance rate of 21.3%. The action generated €14.8 million of assessed tax. The 2022 non-filer intervention and the 2023 corporate return totals refer to different tax years.
Greece filed 6,698,020 personal income tax returns for tax year 2023. This is a filing-volume measure and does not by itself quantify undeclared income, underreported income, or tax evasion.
Taken together, the corporate and personal return figures show the scale of the tax administration’s filing population. The separate non-filer result shows how many contacted corporate taxpayers complied after an intervention, but it should not be generalized to all taxpayers or all forms of non-compliance.
Property, payroll, and tax assessments
The AADE 2024 Annual Report recorded ENFIA assessments for 2024 covering 6,167,304 taxpayers. The total ENFIA assessed was €2,286.7 million. Legal entities accounted for 67,372 taxpayers and were assessed €548.7 million. Natural persons accounted for 6,099,932 taxpayers and were assessed €1,738.0 million.
Payroll-tax compliance work produced another set of measured results in 2024. AADE sent 12,207 email notices concerning payroll tax and made 3,500 payroll-tax phone calls. After AADE action, 6,262 payroll-tax declarations were filed. Those post-action declarations represented €15.0 million in gross wages and generated €271.5 thousand in tax.
These ENFIA and payroll figures concern assessments, declarations, or administrative contacts. They are not estimates of a nationwide property-tax or payroll-tax evasion rate. The amounts also refer to different tax bases, so they should not be combined into a single measure of the shadow economy.
Tax arrears and overdue debtors
Greece’s total tax arrears stood at €109,696.9 million on 1 January 2025, according to the AADE 2024 Annual Report. Of that total, €26,349.0 million were classified as uncollectable arrears, while real arrears were €83,347.9 million. Non-tax revenue made up 38.5% of total arrears on that date.
The arrears distribution also differed by taxpayer type. Legal persons accounted for €67.48 billion of arrears, while natural persons accounted for €42.21 billion. Those arrears were held by 495,722 legal persons and 3,275,985 natural persons on 1 January 2025.
On 31 December 2024, Greece had 3,771,707 debtors with overdue obligations. AADE could take enforcement measures against 2,205,544 of those debtors. A total of 1,565,751 AFMs had overdue debts already in enforcement status on that date.
The arrears totals measure outstanding obligations, not a direct estimate of tax evasion. Tax arrears can include obligations that arose for reasons other than deliberate concealment, and the classification of uncollectable or real arrears provides a different lens from the European Commission’s VAT compliance-gap estimate.
| Arrears measure | Amount or count | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Total tax arrears | €109,696.9 million | 1 January 2025 |
| Uncollectable arrears | €26,349.0 million | 1 January 2025 |
| Real arrears | €83,347.9 million | 1 January 2025 |
| Debtors with overdue obligations | 3,771,707 | 31 December 2024 |
| Debtors subject to enforcement measures | 2,205,544 | 31 December 2024 |
| AFMs with debts in enforcement status | 1,565,751 | 31 December 2024 |
Irrecoverable debts fell in 2024. Greece’s irrecoverable debts were €397.6 million, down 34.3% versus 2023. The AADE EMEIS unit’s irrecoverable debts fell to €340.2 million in 2024 from €552.7 million in 2023. These are reductions in the reported irrecoverable-debt measures, not proof that the underlying obligations were collected in full.
Audits, indirect methods, and customs
AADE completed 29,533 total tax audits in 2024. This included 21,390 non-return audits and 8,143 return audits. Targeted-priority audits reached 3,983 cases and produced €684,066.1 thousand in assessed tax.
Tax audit cases using indirect income techniques totaled 2,063 in 2024. Those cases produced €1.04 billion in assessed tax. The dataset identifies the cases and assessed amount, but does not provide a separate collection amount or an estimate of how much of the assessment represented confirmed evasion.
VAT audits using POS and myDATA cross-checks reached 2,801 cases in 2024 and produced €2,101.8 thousand in assessed tax. Capstone capital-tax audits reached 2,597 cases and produced €20.4 million in assessed tax.
The KEMEEP unit completed 601 audits in 2024. Its total assessment was €444.7 million. KEMEEP collections totaled €365.5 million: €198.6 million collected without Law 4512/2018 and €166.8 million collected with Law 4512/2018.
Customs enforcement also increased in selected measures. Customs post-clearance checks rose to 6,276 in 2024 from 5,879 in 2023, while post-clearance check violations rose to 1,326 from 1,192. Across all post-clearance customs activity, total checks reached 17,032 and total violations reached 3,318 in 2024.
The audit results are best read as enforcement outputs. Assessed tax is not the same as collected tax, and a count of violations is not a national prevalence rate. The European Commission VAT Gap 2023 Greece country report, the European Commission VAT Gap page, and the AADE 2024 Annual Report use different definitions, periods, and measurement purposes, so their figures should remain distinct.