Act III · The argumentsStory 29 of 31
The tax nobody collected
At the end of 2025 taxpayers owed the Tax Department €4.64 billion in unpaid tax, interest and charges. That is more than half of what it collects in a year, and €2 billion more than in 2018.
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Every argument about raising or cutting a tax assumes that taxes are paid. A large amount is not.
Tax owed to the Tax Department at the end of each year, € million, including interest and charges, by what the department says about collecting it.
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Tax Department annual reports, 2019–2025. "Not immediately collectible" is the department's own category; it does not publish what is in it. The comparison in the title uses the 8,071 million the department collected in 2025.
What the numbers say
At the end of 2025 the amount owed to the Tax Department stood at €4.64 billion. At the end of 2018 it was €2.59 billion. In 2025 alone it grew by €711 million.
The department sorts the debt into three parts.
- €1.32 billion is "not immediately collectible". That is the department's own label. It does not publish what is inside the category.
- €0.90 billion is under court action or other collection measures.
- €2.42 billion is collectible, and no measure has yet been taken. This is the part that has grown fastest. In 2018 it was under €0.7 billion.
The total includes interest and charges as well as the tax itself. At the end of 2024 the tax alone was about three quarters of the figure.
What it means for you
For scale, €4.64 billion is 57% of everything the Tax Department collected in 2025. It is about €4,700 for every resident.
It does not follow that the money could simply be collected. Old tax debts typically include companies that no longer exist, people who have died or gone bankrupt, and assessments that are still disputed, though the department publishes no figures for any of these. And interest keeps adding to old debts whether or not anyone will ever pay them.
But €2.42 billion is debt the department itself calls collectible and has not yet acted on. That is the figure worth watching.
What people argue
Is this evasion, or bookkeeping? One side reads the figure as proof that those who pay are carrying those who do not, and wants faster enforcement. The January 2026 reform gave the department new powers; the press has reported that they include sealing the premises of a business that owes more than €20,000. The other side points out that a large part of the total is old, disputed or beyond recovery, and that a big headline number tells you more about how slowly old debts are written off than about how much could be raised.
Why is it growing? The department's own reports show the collectible part rising in most years and more than tripling since 2018. The Audit Office attributes much of the rise in 2022 and 2023 to a backlog of old assessments being cleared, which records debts that already existed. How much of the rest is new debt, and how much is debt not being pursued, cannot be told from the published figures.
How we know
The totals and the three categories are from the Tax Department's annual reports for 2019 to 2025. Collections for the year are from the same reports.
There is no published split of the 2025 total by type of tax. The Audit Office published one for the end of 2023, on a different basis and with a different total from the department's own for the same date. On that basis, unpaid income tax was the largest part, followed by VAT and the defence contribution. The two bodies have not reconciled their figures, and we have not tried to.