By the end of the year, the new General Directorate of Financial Transaction Control (DEOS) will have an upgraded online platform to receive reports from citizens regarding cases of tax and customs violations.
Through this system, every complaint and piece of information will be reviewed, filtered, and rated for its severity and credibility.
The information collected will be analyzed in conjunction with data from internal and external databases, banking records, customs data, and information from other national or international authorities. Cases with the highest risk scores will be immediately referred for audit.
By 2026, DEOS will conduct at least 39,300 inspections, supported by 3 anti-smuggling vessels, 6 drones, 1 underwater drone, 36 portable cameras, 35 vehicles (passenger cars, trucks, motorcycles), group communication systems, and weapons. Inspections are coordinated in real time through two operations centers.
The scope of action for DEOS inspectors will be broad. They will conduct everything from inspections of businesses and professionals to maritime enforcement operations, checks on fuel, cigarettes, and drugs, as well as investigations into money laundering, corruption, and illegal financing.
The operational plan calls for, among other things, 4,500 special inspections and investigations into economic crime, smuggling, and customs evasion. Under scrutiny are cases of corruption involving public officials, EU subsidies, intellectual property violations, suspicious product movements, and cases of money laundering.
Complaints
In 2025, citizen complaints to the Independent Authority for Public Revenue (IAPR) regarding tax and customs violations, as well as corruption involving IAPR officials, reached 41,354, while a total of 234,789 complaints were recorded over the four-year period 2022–2025 (78,899 in 2022, 70,903 in 2023, 43,633 in 2024, and 41,354 last year).
Spec ifically, 16,970 reports regarding cases of tax evasion, smuggling, and corruption involving tax and customs officials, while another 24,384 complaints were submitted via the appodixi application and concerned cases of receipts that did not meet the legal requirements for issuance.
In fact, the relevant Tax Administration services conducted 17,817 partial on-site preventive audits last year, utilizing, among other things, reports from the appodixi app, while 1,978 of these audits concerned cases of tax evasion, smuggling, and corruption stemming from complaints registered in the digital Simple Complaints Management application.
However, while the total number of complaints submitted during the 2022–2025 period amounts to 234,789, the number of audits conducted on the reported cases is significantly lower.
This is linked both to the credibility of the complaints and to the inability of the competent audit services to investigate all of them, due to understaffing of the audit mechanism.
Pending Cases
In any case, the fact that far too many complaints remain uninvestigated for several years creates a significant problem for the thousands of business owners and self-employed professionals who have been reported, as under current regulations these taxpayers remain effectively “held hostage” for 10 or even 12 years.
It is worth noting that complaints filed against business owners and self-employed professionals, as well as other supporting information accompanying the complaints and pertaining to them, are required to be retained in the AADE’s electronic records for up to 12 years, so they can be used in future tax and customs audits.
Specifically, the AADE decision issued in 2023, which established the procedure for submitting, evaluating, and utilizing complaints and information regarding violations of tax and customs legislation through the“Citizen Complaints”application, stipulates, among other things:
- Complaints and information of a tax nature, for which no action has been taken at the audit level within 6 years of their submission, shall be transferred to a separate electronic file, which is maintained for historical purposes or for potential use following the correlation of their content with new complaints or information. If, within 10 years of the submission of the complaint or information, it has not been utilized in any way, it is permanently deleted from the Complaint and Information Management Information System.
- Complaints and reports of a customs nature for which no action has been taken at the audit level within 7 years of their submission shall be transferred to a separate electronic archive, which is maintained for historical purposes or for potential use following the correlation of their content with new complaints or information. If, within 12 years of the submission of the complaint or report, it has not been utilized in any way, it is permanently deleted from the Complaint and Report Management Information System.