Name & Shame List has Little Effect

When Croatia’s inland revenue department published a list of 102,370 tax debtors who owed the state a whopping 6.9 billion euros back in 2012, they hoped that they would ‘shame’ them into coughing up with their arrears. As daily Jutarnji list reports, that has far from been the case…

The latest list of tax debtors released on the 31st of July this year reveals that there now 82,408 tax debtors, 19,962 less than 2 years ago, with the combined debt just over 1.1 billion less than it was back in 2012. However, only 2.6% of the outstanding debt has been paid to the state since the ‘name and shame’ list went public. As of 1 September this year 4,648 tax debtors had been removed from the list for paying off their debt in full, amounting to 64 million euros. Along with those who had paid their debt, 8,057 tax debtors were wiped from the list after paying off part of their debt with the remained not high enough to qualify being on the list.

Expectations were that the government would collect around half of the debt after publishing the list.