Greece’s tax revolution harnesses big data and drones to shake off a legacy of crisis
ATHENS—With a pristine white exterior, the Greece tax authority’s new headquarters looks out of place on a clogged industrial artery outside Athens. A former shopping mall and ice rink, the building has been overhauled into an ultramodern digital center that has led the rescue of the nation’s ailing finance and tax sector.
It is teeming with inspectors who chase down tax cheats with the help of drones, big data and live surveillance feeds from as far as Greece’s island ports and remote farming villages.
Analysts at the Independent Authority for Public Revenue monitor millions of transactions in real time and order stings on businesses flagged by algorithms for a high potential of illegal activity.
Greece’s tax system—once a byword for inefficiency—has been rewired by technology.
Outcast
Now, the country that spent nearly a decade as Europe’s financial outcast, drowning in debt, has become one of its best budget performers, with bonds restored to investment grade by all major ratings agencies.
“We worked systematically over the years, with dedication,” Giorgos Pitsilis, governor of the revenue authority, told The Associated Press (AP). “We started from a situation of no data to a situation with big data.”
Greece was one of just six EU member states that recorded a budget surplus in 2024, after running deficits for decades. Momentum carried into this year.
Moody’s upgraded Greece’s bonds to investment grade in March, praising its large-scale push to digitize the tax system. Jason Graffam, senior vice president at ratings agency Morningstar DBRS, noted that Greece’s long-term borrowing costs now sit slightly above Spain’s—and below Italy’s and France’s.
“The Greece of today is indeed very different from a decade ago,” Graffam said. “There has clearly been durable change to the country’s economic model and its fiscal regime.”
During the crisis years, international creditors imposed punishing austerity measures in exchange for three massive bailout packages. Greece’s population felt the pain deeply—wages were slashed, companies shut down and the economy bled jobs.
Forced to modernize
Sustained pressure from lenders forced successive governments to modernize one of Europe’s weakest tax systems.
Out went paper files and fax machines. In came cashless, paperless systems powered by algorithms that scour card payments, tax filings, payroll data, customs declarations and bank records—and flag anomalies for inspectors to pursue.
Repurposed smartphones carried by inspectors in the field stream video and audio back to headquarters. There are panic buttons to use when someone feels threatened.
Back at headquarters, screens map ongoing site inspections and drone feeds from multiple sites: from restaurants and ports to hidden grain silos and fruit delivery trucks—even live readings from ships’ fuel tanks.
‘Saturday Night Fever’
Tax and customs officials described how the data translates into raids. They spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because of the confidentiality of their work and citing reasons of personal safety.
During a recent nightclub sweep dubbed “Saturday Night Fever,” they matched individual table orders against receipts to uncover undeclared sales, mostly of alcoholic drinks.
“We knew the tables were full, but the receipts didn’t match,” one official said, adding that after inspectors showed up, the nightclub’s reported revenues doubled within days.
Fraud can be detected by cross-referencing mobile phone activity with reported sales as recorded by cash registers and card-payment terminals that by law must be connected to the tax authority.
“If we detect signals from 20 phones inside a store, but see almost no receipts, that’s a cue to dispatch a team immediately,” another inspector explained.
The reforms have salvaged Greece’s reputation abroad. At home, the windfall has funded 1.6 billion euros in tax cuts recently announced by the center-right government.
