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The amount of debt to the Funds amounts to 18.3 billion euros, which may have been included in some debt settlement, but ultimately the failure to pay monthly instalments or current contributions on time led to their loss.
Of the 26.09 billion euros already paid, 70.14% are no longer in the process. Given that, according to official data from the 1st Quarterly Report of KEAO, the total debt to Social Security amounts to the incredible amount of 47.88 billion euros, it is understood that of these 18.3 billion euros (38.22%) were initially registered through an agreement, but were never collected, as the debtors did not meet the required conditions.
The course of the agreements has so far yielded EFKA an income of €3.25 billion, an amount equivalent to just 6.78% of the total debt. At the same time, there are still another €4.53 billion (9.46% of the total) that remain included in some form of agreement and remain to be collected, provided the debtors continue to pay their monthly instalments on time.
The highest debt amount in the 120-installment regime
It seems from the KEAO data that the largest amount of debt (1.71 billion euros) that is within the regulations was included in the 120 instalments. This is a regulation that is not in force, but was instituted five years ago (Law 4.611/2019). However, it still has 138,968 active debtors, who, in addition to the monthly instalments, also pay the current insurance contributions on time, in order to keep their regulations in force. In this way, on the one hand, they reduce (albeit at a slow pace) their debt to EFKA, on the other hand, they do not create new debt, which could create additional problems for the viability of their business.
To date, this agreement has generated revenue of €767,900,067 from 180,617 debtors who have completed the process either by paying all instalments or by paying the debt in full. At the same time, however, €3.08 billion have also been lost as a result of this regulation, as 287,787 debtors have not complied with the conditions that had been established. Thus, of the €5.56 billion that were initially included in the 120-instalment scheme, an amount corresponding to 13.79% has been collected, an amount equal to 30.76% is pending collection, while an amount equal to 55% has been found outside the process, 43%, or more than half.
It seems that the efficiency of the “fixed” 24-dose configuration, which is the only one currently active, is also limited. According to KEAO, in the first quarter of this year, 123,892 debtors who adhered to the agreement were registered as active, with the total value of the debt that can be collected amounting to 926,955,594 euros. Considering that there were 1,101,675 debtors (individuals and legal entities) who opted for the “permanent” regime to settle their debt, worth 11.83 billion euros, it can be seen that only 11.24% of them remain active.
Is there any professional…batachtsi?
Furthermore, in the ideal scenario where all debt currently within the “fixed” agreement is paid off, this would correspond to only 7.83% of the total originally contracted. It is clear that to date, more than 1.2 billion euros have been collected from 416,352 agreement processes that have completed the installment payment process. At the same time, however, 561,431 cases of agreements considered lost (a percentage of 50.96%) have been recorded, as it was not possible to pay the installments, with the value of the debt that remains outside the process reaching 9.63 billion euros (a percentage of 81.39%).
This element shows that, despite the massive arrival of debtors to join the “permanent” regime, more than half of them abandon the process, unable to pay their instalments, while correspondingly more than 80% of the total debt is lost, which is assumed to have been configured. This indicates that either the resulting instalments (up to 24 at the most) are particularly high for debtors to meet their timely payment (together with current contributions), or that there are professional “batachchis”.
In the second case, debtors in this category adhere to the agreement in order to avoid, even for a time, forced collection measures (e.g. confiscations), they also receive an initial insurance notice if necessary, and then let the agreement lapse, creating a new and perhaps even larger debt to the Treasury. In particular for these debtors, KEAO seeks to streamline the control process, so that with the appropriate cross-referencing of data from other bodies (e.g. GEMI, AADE), it cannot accept any future request for inclusion in regulation, putting even more pressure on them to pay the entire debt, together with fines and surcharges.