The New Era in Greece’s Tax System

Greece made an important step to digitise its tax system and introduce an innovative platform for taxpayers to fulfil their tax obligations. The new platform will offer businesses a collaborative environment where the data they provide to the Greek Independent Authority of Public Revenues (IAPR) will not only affect their own books but will also auto-populate their buyers’ tax situation.

As a result of this innovative solution, taxpayers will be relieved from some of their filing obligations, which will be fulfilled automatically as a result of this application.

Taxpayers will submit their required transactional data through an automated solution to the platform or through the web portal of the IAPR.

The new platform, called myDATA, which stands for My Digital Accounting and Tax Application, includes two books: The Record Book, and The Summary Book.

The record book records the submitted transactions to the myDATA platform. These transactions are classified as income/expense according to their type (e.g sale of goods, provision of services etc.). Classified data is then summarised within the summary book and depicts the accounting and tax result for the respective period.

Suppliers are required to submit a summary of all their domestic and cross-border sale transactions (wholesale/retail). The reported sales data will update its income books and the domestic transaction data will update the buyer’s expense books.

Buyers are required to submit a summary of their domestic and cross-border purchase invoices for B2C transactions in Greece and abroad. On the other hand they need to submit acquisitions from abroad and they also have a joint responsibility with their suppliers for reporting B2B transactions in Greece. If the suppliers don’t submit the related transactions on the myDATA platform, then their buyers, in order to comply with the e-books requirement, should transmit this transaction data.

Taxpayers will continue to file their tax returns on the basis of their accounting books, but following the submission of their tax returns the data declared in them will be reconciled against the result of the submitted data recorded in the e-books for the corresponding period. If there is a discrepancy between the e-books and VAT returns the taxpayer has to correct the discrepancy within a two month period. After this time (initial disagreement) the taxpayer has two options: 1) to correct the discrepancy and achieve consistency between the VAT returns and e-books or 2) they can explain the discrepancy and achieve justifiable consistency. This will be considered as agreed and no further action will be taken.

A tax audit or penalty may be triggered if no action is taken by the taxpayer within the two month period to correct or defend the discrepancy.

There is an online portal available from the IAPR for testing purposes, where taxpayers can test the integration of their accounting software with myDATA APIs and test their solutions.

The myDATA scheme proposal was open to public consultation until 6 September 2019; no response has been published to-date by the IAPR on the feedback received from the industry and other stakeholders on the scheme. It is expected that myDATA will be introduced as a pilot in Q4 2019 and be fully operational by the beginning of 2020.