← Back to context

Comment by Vasbarlog

4 hours ago

That sounds like what Varoufakis planned to implement in Greece in case of a default in 2015.

” What we planned to do was this. There's the tax office website, as in Britain and everywhere else, where citizens (taxpayers accessing the website) use their tax identification number and transfer money from their bank account to their tax identification number via online banking to pay VAT, income tax, and so on. We were planning to surreptitiously create reserve accounts linked to each tax identification number without notifying anyone, simply so that this system would operate in secret. With the push of a button, we could assign PIN numbers to the holders of the tax identification numbers (taxpayers). For example, in a case where the state owed a pharmaceutical company one million euros for medicines purchased on behalf of the National Health Service, we could immediately make a transfer to the reserve account corresponding to the pharmaceutical company's tax identification number and provide them with a PIN number. They could use it as a kind of parallel payment mechanism to transfer any portion of those digital funds they wanted to any tax identification number they owed money to. Or even to use it to make tax payments.”

https://cemi.ehess.fr/docannexe/file/2911/sapir.6.nov.pdf