Portugal’s taxpayers are working hard to pay off the debts incurred by a series of fiscally incompetent and profligate governments.
Tax revenue last year beat all records at €38.984 billion, €1.9 billion more than 2014’s take, up a selfless 5%.
Data from the General Directorate of the State Budget failed to include a ‘thank you’ for a tax performance second to none by the nation's companies, consumers and workers.
Indirect tax receipts such as VAT were up just under 6% and direct taxes were up 4%, boosted by corporation tax receipts which rose 16% as the economy started to improve.
The delightfully named ‘extraordinary contributions’ from the energy sector were up 77.4% amid groans of pain and the contribution from Portugal’s beloved banking sector was up 13.5%, more than this being spent on bailing out Banif and covering up the Bank of Portugal’s other expensive mistakes.
Income tax eased by 1.3% due to decreased revenue from capital and the reduction in withholding taxes which lopped €400 million off the 2014 figure.
Despite the record tax income enjoyed by the Passos Coelho government, tax revenue in 2015 did not reach its growth target of 5.1% mostly due to a large number of VAT refunds that had to be paid out due to some over-enthusiastic guesstimates by the Tax Authority, keen as ever to overcharge its customers on pain of forfeiture, while returning customers’ money as slowly as humanly possible.
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And there is much else that was wrongly 'assumed' to be underway and at a suitable level of development over 30 years ago when Portugal first put its name forward to join the European Union. But so much was only ever pretending to be functioning. And leaving the 1,000 richest Portuguese families entirely off the 'taxables' and secretly protecting them from scrutiny destroys any claim by Financas of being impartial.