Following the introduction of new regulations for professional property agents, real estate agents and appraisal agents late last year, individuals with one of these job descriptions will be required to possess a state approved National Training Notary (OKJ) license by May 10th or by May 25th at the latest, vg.hu reports. If a company offers any of these services, then at least one owner or employee must be fully licensed, with the regional notary carrying out annual checks. János Kiss, director of Perfekt Zrt. stated his belief that the new regulations will lead to many agents signing up for training courses to acquire these qualifications, meaning a sudden flood in applications for those offering the courses, just like how interest in graduate school spikes whenever the economy nosedives.

Because Hungarian government agencies are always just a few weeks away from announcing some type of goofy public relations contest, the national tax office APEH announced that it was planning to organize a children's story and comic-writing competition where inspectors, collectors and even the office's leaders can enter, fn.hu reports. The creations will later be used in a tax awareness campaign aimed at kindergartners and elementary school kids, apparently to get to them before they realize that no one in Hungary properly pays their taxes. But then things hit a bump in the road, or this being Hungary, a pothole.

According to a survey made by the Hungarian unit of French credit insurance company Coface summarized on index.hu, only 50% of local companies currently holding back on paying their creditors are actually unable to pay because of financial distress. The study of 50,000 companies found that 20% of "nonpaying" have the means to pay their invoices but choose not to, while a further 30% of bad debts have gone bad because of clerical errors. At the time of the survey 4% of the firms where judged to be "totally unqualified" for any sort of credit and an additional 3% were already under bankruptcy proceedings.

Via our friends at the British Chamber of Commerce in Hungary we found this link to an interesting and probably very worthwhile survey on economic and business climate conditions in the region by a group of German chambers. It's a bit confusing at points - we twice confused the buttons for rating the importance of different things with the buttons for how bad the things are - so if you are going to fill it out you'll probably want to stay as sober as possible, given the topic.