Refundable advance: Waiting thousands of businesses for the objections

Waiting remain thousands of professionals and businesses who were “cut off” from the refundable advance or received smaller aids and filed objections to Ministry of Finance.

So far they have not been informed about the progress of the objections and as everything shows that their anxiety will be prolonged as the competent committee does not have time to complete the review of the requests until the end of October when the deadline given by the Ministry of Finance expires.

According to relevant actors more time will be required until the landscape becomes clear for professionals and businesses entitled to retroactively receive government loans from the refundable advance cycles. It is pointed out that the issue has been pending for over two years with businesses waiting to find out if they are finally entitled to the aid or not. In fact, in order to clear the files with the objections more quickly, the Ministry of Finance had hired a private company in order to provide the necessary technical support needed by the committee that has undertaken the control of the objections.

However, businesses and professionals who will be vindicated and receive the state aid, will be asked to pay the debt of the refundable advance in 96 interest-free installments, with the amounts being “cut” up to 75%.

The instructions for the refundable advance

According to the instructions given by the Ministry of Finance:

• Review requests concerning companies for which work has been suspended, regardless of the reason, at the time of payment of the aid, cannot be satisfied
• Review requests concerning applicant companies that have made, in the previous year since the submission of the grant application, a declaration of initiation for the exercise of business activity and cessation of operations in the tax register, are examined taking into account exclusively the economic data of the business activity resulting from the last declaration of initiation

The control of the objections is carried out based on the data declared by the businesses and the data sent in writing by AADE and contained in its databases. Applications for receiving government loans that were rejected for various reasons during the application period, are reviewed after tax checks on books and data, while other checks are carried out by the competent services.

The procedure provides that if the review shows the merits of the relevant request, the file is sent to AADE for review. Then, the AADE proceeds again in an automated control of the conditions, taking into account exclusively the data that the company has declared to the tax administration, with the exception of the ones defined in the decisions on carrying out cross-checks, and carrying out tax audits. If the automated check shows that the company is entitled to the grant of aid an aggregated and detailed statement is created with the details of the beneficiaries and the entitled amount.

Source: ot.gr