“Never before has Social Security seized so many bank accounts” clawing back money owed.
Using this sentence as its headline, Diário de Notícias has been limited to figures from 2011 to 2017, explaining updates have been delayed by several months.
The bottom line is that in 2017 Social Security opened a further 500,000 ‘seizures’ of bank accounts, IRS, IVA and others to cover debts pegged at 7 billion euros.
The story explains nothing of the human misery behind this ‘enforced recovery’ of State ‘debts’ – and it emerged days after yet another report highlighted how much money slips out of the country every year, avoiding paying any kind of taxes whatsoever.
A study by the European Commission shows that Portugal is the third country in the EU blighted by wealth ‘disappearing to tax havens’.
Only Cyprus and Malta ‘beat Portugal’ in what has been likened to a championships for diverting money offshore.
Between 2004 to 2016, around a quarter of this country’s GDP ‘vanished’, reports negocios online. That amount in numbers? “Around 50 billion euros”.
But the online stresses losses are reducing, thanks to various measures adopted by the European Union to crack down on tax evasion.
