Rampant is not really accurate. It's more like a national sport or some sort of religious movement.
Greeks have been among the first ones to go bankrupt in human history, they will be probably the last.
They hate the taxman but at the same time they love getting freebies, they pay zero in taxes but everybody was enjoying benefits from the government, just imagine the term "14th wage". Yeah, they were getting 14th wages a year!
I've been to Greece a couple of times, even before the euro and the crisis, receipts were nonexistent, you would get your restaurant bill on a piece of paper handwritten, asking to pay with a card, the machine is broken, asking for a receipt, the machine is broken.
Yeah, the measure is not right, its nor normal but neither is that country.
Either way, nothing is going to save them, the whole country and system is flawed from birth.
So the Greeks are just genetically predisposed to tax evasion?
What about the notion that tax rates are too high, to the point that businesses and labor are opting for the black market?
Few problems are more ingrained, or harder to combat, than the shadow economy, which appears to be growing again as new austerity measures compel once law-abiding Greeks to go off the books. Greece’s black market is estimated at 20 to 25 percent of the gross domestic product, as more people have stopped reporting their income to avoid paying
taxes that, by some estimates, have risen to 70 percent of an individual’s gross income.“The heart of the matter for an ever-rising number of citizens and businesses is that they simply do not have the financial resources anymore to meet their rising tax obligations,” said Jens Bastian, an economist and a member of a team of European Union specialists that helped supervise the country’s earlier bailouts.
Short on alternatives, he said, “many are falling back into the gray economy.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/18/world/europe/greece-bailout-black-market.htmlIf tax rates like that are possible, it's no wonder 1/4 of the GDP is black market. Up to 45% income tax, up to 10% "solidarity" tax, 16% employee payroll tax, not to mention VAT, real property tax, etc.
As an American, I feel fleeced by the IRS but there is no comparison to Greece. I would dodge taxes too if I lived there.