Filenews 25 October 2024 - by Adamos Adamou
The Parliament unanimously approved yesterday the tightening of the legislative framework requested by the Ministry of Labor for a more effective treatment of "black work", undeclared or even declared, confirming the common course of the executive and legislative power.
The stricter framework, consisting of the doubling of administrative fines for each case of detection of undeclared work, as well as the electronic census of employees in the private sector and their terms of employment, is now expected to enter into force with the publication of legislative changes in the official gazette of the Republic.
With the changes, the administrative fine imposed by inspectors in case of detected undeclared work of an employee, even if it is illegal employment, is doubled, as it increases from €500 to €1,000 for each employee, in relation to the month in which the violation was detected.
In addition, in case an inspector finds a repetition of the offence of undeclared work by the employer for a second or third time within two years, the penalty/fine for each undeclared employee is increased to €2,000 and to €3,000 in case of repetition of the violation for each subsequent to the second time. Initially the bill provided for extrajudicial fines but during the discussion these were withdrawn to avoid possible legal obstacles. The employers' associations also disagreed.
There were also changes in the context of the discussion of the bills regarding the electronic census, which, instead of by decree, becomes mandatory under the current legislation. As stated in the explanatory report of the Labour Committee, with the revised text of the bill "the obligation of employers to register the terms of employment of their employees in an information system is explicitly included in the provisions of the legislation and the Minister of Labour and Social Insurance is empowered to issue a decree setting out the procedural arrangements concerning the implementation of this obligation of employers".
The many evils of the undeclared
As mentioned, the aim of the new legislative framework is to make tackling undeclared work more effective, which creates a number of negative problems.
The Minister of Labour had mentioned in Parliament that the phenomenon of undeclared and illegal work is estimated to cause losses to the Social Security Fund amounting to €10 million, annually.
