Branded “toys” are too expensive for EFKA

Gold Factory The audit revealed that more than €500,000 was spent in a year by “land workers”, but also… fraudulent employers, who appeared to be paying unskilled workers working in their agricultural businesses fees of up to €1.650 million a year, To the National Transparency Authority (hands)Which ends with a compass of the changes he is planning. Ministry of Labor To the point of work checks.

However, the procedure, which was put in place in 2010, has major malfunctions, and as a result many employers as well as employees have been exploiting the system’s “loopholes” all these years.

This is because while it was created to cover workers with a casual or semi-employment status, employers, even on large agricultural farms, seem to choose it, because it is cheaper in terms of the amount of insurance contributions, while proper checks are not carried out.

How it works

The insurance rate with the brand is 25% and is withheld when the employee redeems it. That is, for one day’s work, a groundskeeper receives a work stamp worth 70 euros, contributions of 17.5 euros and a salary of 52.5 euros. Thus, a domestic worker who works 8 hours cleaning houses and earns 7 euros per hour, with a stamp she will receive 42 euros net and has insurance deductions of 14 euros, equivalent to 1.2 stamps.

Employee categories Those who use the brand are ground workers, domestic workers (such as domestic helpers, drivers, gardeners, people who babysit, transport or care for the elderly, etc.), craftsmen who carry out individual minor repair work that does not constitute construction work, teachers to provide special courses, etc.

The stamp is paid by the employer concerned and is refunded by the employee, after insurance deductions. The employer can purchase the brand from him. Elta and BanksWhile he can choose direct payment by depositing the money into the employee’s account with the necessary information, such as name, AMKA number and VAT number Employee. Typically, employees and insured persons employed by the company are entitled to the same benefits as other insured persons who receive regular salaries.

Employers as well as employees have been exploiting the system’s “loopholes” all these years.

As long as the amounts declared as wages are, of course, also paid to the “worker”, after deducting insurance contributions. Because mainly in the cases recorded by the Environment Agency, there were declarations of amounts without purchasing corresponding works or declarations of wages, without EFKA receiving the minimum amount, and therefore there is no recorded insurance time for employees.

Of course, there were also exorbitant amounts to which the smallest deductions were imposed, with the result that the “land workers” – or some who appeared as such – were paid generous wages, while the state and the EFKA lost significant revenues.

Some of these “loopholes” were recorded by the Environment Agency about a year and a half ago, after a national examination with the participation of an eEFKA expert, and were aimed at the legality of issuing and cashing employer checks for insurance from land workers.

What did the test show?

The audit was initiated at the request of the Directorate General of Contributions to eEFKA, which, after initial audits, identified, among other things, the following:

a) Particularly significant recoveries amounted to €519,031 from people allegedly working as land workers.

for) Issuance of company stamps by employers for exorbitant amounts exceeding 1,500,000 euros!

In the context of the Environment Agency’s audit Complaints about employers issuing work permits using personal information of people who never offered them work were also investigated. In fact, for the monitoring, information was extracted from the relevant ministries and agencies (Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, Ministry of Rural Development and Food, Ministry of Immigration and Asylum, AADE, EL.TA, IDIKA SA, banking institutions) and incredible cases of circumvention of the legislation emerged, the most significant of which are as follows:

1. 49,799 employers were identified who had declared excessive amounts of workers’ wages, many of whom simultaneously issued work stamps worth more than €15,000 each. There was, for example, an employer who in 2017 declared workers’ wages of close to €1 million (€986,802.33). At the same time, in the same year, it emerged that he had issued 47 stamps worth more than €15,000 each. In 2018, the same employer declared fees of €1.5 million and 53 works worth more than €15,000, while the same situation continued until 2020, when, according to his declaration, he paid fees of €1.6 million and 73 works worth more than €15,000 each.

2. The status of a land worker who was declared employed in 2017 by 29 employers, in 2018 by 58 employers, in 2019 by 35 employers and in 2020 by 42 employers. The person receives respectively 195,660.66 euros, 277,180.77 euros, 211,756.82 euros and 519,031.34 euros.

3. Cases have been recorded of land workers who allegedly extorted huge sums of money through work. For example, in 2017 a worker received a salary through his employer of EUR 195,660, in 2018 the same worker received EUR 293,000, almost the same amount in 2019 (EUR 230,557), while in 2020 he received, always through his employer, a salary of EUR 519,031.

4. 24,779 land workers who were not insured in e-EFKA were identified for any work, while they were reported to have received particularly high amounts as compensation for providing work. Guidance: The worker received compensation of 540,478 without the EFKA having the slightest stamp.

5. A list of 1,469 entries has been compiled, detailing employers who appear to have spent €100,000 or more on workers’ compensation through the employer scheme. In fact, there are companies on the list whose expenditures amount to more than €1,650 million in a single year.

Changes are coming

The result reached – outside the hands of the competent Public Prosecution – the competent Ministry of Labour and the EFKA administration, as happened during the audit process, in addition to serious contradictions in the application of the current legislation, and major shortcomings in the existing provisions of the regulatory framework were found.

For this reason, the Ministry is already planning to make changes in order to avoid the phenomenon of circumvention of the procedure, tax evasion and tax avoidance as well as full-time “hidden” employment, with the direct consequence of distorting competition and losing the competitiveness of EFKA revenues.

As long as there is no draft law in the fall with different provisions, most importantly insurance, from the new leadership of the Ministry of Labor, it is not unlikely that the subject of the company logo will be among those that will be included.