Bulgaria’s revenue agency has so far imposed 200 000 leva fines for breaches of Euro Adoption Act

The National Revenue Agency has so far imposed fines to a total of close to 200 000 leva for breaches of the Euro Adoption Act, most for unreasonably inflated prices, spokesperson Anna Mitova said on January 9.

Mitova said that the majority of businesses were honest and were complying with the Euro Adoption Act.

“Our data shows that traders are generally honest, and violations are found in less than 10 per cent of those inspected,” Mitova said.

“A lot of information from inspections is currently being processed, because traders have five working days to provide documents with information about their prices before and after January 1. And if there is any increase, they must provide an explanation of what it is due to.”

The National Revenue Agency has already received about 1000 reports from the public, many of which are about food products and inspectors are working on them as a priority.

Tsvetislava Lakova of the Consumer Protection Commission said that on the morning of January 9, a total of 14 retail outlets in Sofia were inspected, and five of them were found to have unjustified price increases.

Bulgaria’s largest bank, DSK Bank, said on January 9 that a total of 290 million leva was accepted at its branches in the first three working days of January, according to updated data.

On average, cash deposits for the period amounted to about 45 million leva per day, with the average amount of one cash deposit per account being about 4500 leva.

For the same period, cash currency exchange averaged about 52 million leva per day, or an average of about 3500leva per client.

The data shows that customers more often prefer to receive funds in cash through currency exchange, while account deposits are less frequent, but with a larger average amount.

In terms of the number of transactions, the bank reports an average of about 10 000 cash deposits per day , with the highest number of transactions being carried out on January 5, the first working day of January – 12179 .

Branch operations are handled by an average of about 500 employees daily , engaged in processing operations in the DSK Bank branch network. Nearly 98 000 individual clients are served in the bank’s offices, it said.

The workload is measured not only in the number of operations, but also in the real physical volume of funds . Over the three days, DSK Bank branches processed nearly 7.9 million coins with a total weight of over 35 tons , as well as nearly 5.4 million banknotes .

DSK Bank data shows that when exchanging money, customers most often bring coins with a higher denomination. In just three days, over 1.28 million one lev coins and nearly 840 thousand two leva coins were processed , which shows that people are exchanging real accumulated amounts, not just small coins. The share of 10, 20 and 50 stotinki coins is also significant – a total of over three million pieces.

Along with operations in offices, customers also actively use self-service channels.

From January 1-7, more than 52.7 million leva were deposited through deposit ATMs , with nearly 86.7 thousand operations and an average amount of one deposit of about 610 leva.

At the same time, over 127.5 million euro were withdrawn from ATMs through nearly 489 000 withdrawals , with the average amount of one withdrawal being about 260 euro, DSK Bank said.

(Photo: Clive Leviev-Sawyer)