The new, stricter Highway Code recently issued is part of a government effort to reduce road accidents by penalising driving offenders. In this context it is a reasonable assumption that motorists who drive without a valid licence, or without paying for insurance or road tax, are likely to be as negligent in their driving behaviour as they are in administrative matters.
At the same time, with the increasing digitisation of data collected by government departments, it has become easier for them to cross check whether citizens are fulfilling their legal and financial obligations to the State. For example, the government now has the ability to cross-check citizens’ income as declared on their tax returns against their patterns of expenditure as revealed by their assets, their credit cards and their bank accounts. This has greatly helped the drive against tax evasion, and the ability to recover large amounts of unpaid income tax and VAT has helped to put the government’s finances on a sounder footing.
In the motoring field, the government has been able to check the status of motorists’ vehicles through collating data from the vehicle licensing agency, vehicle testing stations and insurance companies. Indeed all this information is now available to motorists themselves through the My Auto section of the Gov.gr Wallet smartphone app. This now contains all the information contained in the vehicle log book – chassis number, vehicle make and model, date of first registration, date of last transfer of ownership etc. – as well as details of the payment of road tax, most recent vehicle inspection, and insurance status including the insurance company and contract number.
There is also a facility for uploading one’s driving licence to the wallet, although this feature appears not to be available to foreign residents who do not have a police ID number. Thus, apart from being a convenient way of checking when the vehicle will meet certain deadlines, in theory on being stopped by the police it should be possible to present the details on one’s mobile phone instead of a handful of documents – although we have not had the occasion to test whether this is acceptable to police patrols.
According to a joint statement by the Ministries of Economy and Finance, Digital Governance, Infrastructure and Transportation, Citizen Protection, and the Independent Authority for Public Revenue (AADE), the first checks through cross-referencing of vehicle data have been carried out, and have identified which vehicles are being used without insurance, without paying road tax, or without the statutory KTEO tests. As a result no fewer than 220,000 warning notices have been sent out to vehicle owners, which in the first phase, for 2025, relate only to the lack of insurance coverage and non-payment of road tax.
Specifically:
a) 100,971 notices have been sent out to individuals and 7,810 to “legal persons” – i.e. companies or organisations – a total of 108,781, for having uninsured vehicles.
b) 101,721 notices have been sent to individuals and 8,316 to companies, a total of 110,037, for failure to pay road tax.
The aim of the first phase is to advise citizens of their non-compliance as identified up to 25th August, notifying them them that they must comply by paying road tax or purchasing insurance within 15 days. After the expiry of the 15-day deadline the data will be cross-checked again and those who have still not complied will receive notice of the relevant fine by SMS, email or mail. In the case of uninsured vehicles, the fine will range from €250 to €1,000 depending on the type of vehicle. The fines for non-payment of road tax vary according to the vehicle category.
Source: Haniotika Nea, 11/10/25
Download links for the Gov.gr Wallet can be found on the Wallet website at: https://wallet.gov.gr/