Bulgarian tax authorities find 20 million leva unpaid taxes from 850 individuals
Check-ups by Bulgaria’s National Revenue Agency (NRA) of 850 individuals in January to June 2014 uncovered 20 million leva in taxes due from undeclared income.
The NRA said on September 2 that the individuals will have two weeks to pay up or the sums will be collected “by force”.
The agency said that 80 per cent of all such check-ups were done to see if there were discrepancies between property and income.
The most common cases were those in which property such as real estate, motor vehicles and other personal belongings that a person owned were out of keeping with the income that had been declared.
In such cases, the auditors assessed the value of the property, compared it with the revenue, calculated the difference and imposed a tax liability due with interest for the past five years.
Check-ups involved not only apartments, houses and cars registered with various state authorities but also individual purchases of big-ticket items such as yachts, household equipment, expensive jewellery, among other goods.
The NRA said that all companies registered for VAT in Bulgaria submitted to the agency monthly information about their customers, including their names and state personal identity numbers.
Revenue agency computers then often detected cases where, for example, monthly payments on leases and mortgages far exceeded the official income of the spouses in a household.
