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.

Hungary's online public administration service Ügyfélkapu ("Client Gateway", which currently has 850,000 registered users) returned to its old version after a brand-spanking new version launched on March 1 experienced many errors following its launch. According to hirextra.hu, no date has been set for the relaunch of the new version.

No doubt because of the ongoing crisis, an increasing number of employers in Hungary are believed to be violating regulations on work hours, forcing workers to do unpaid overtime. A recent piece on origo.hu illustrates the trend with the case of an employee of a multinational, who said their work contract had been modified at the end of last year, thus introducing flexible (kötetlen) work hours and making it impossible to account for their earlier overtime, while the number of tasks they were responsible for increased as result of layoffs.

The ongoing fiscal calamity in Greece has again brought the issue of taxes - and how some countries seem to have such trouble collecting enough of them to finance their spending - to the forefront. Why is it that in places like Greece and its sister in perpetual fiscal distress (that would be Hungary) can't seem to convince their citizens to cough up the state's fair share of national income? One answer, of course, is that what the state considers a "fair share" is usually quite different from the opinion of its citizens. But another seems to be a rather bizarre reluctance on the part of the state to make big trouble for companies and individuals guilty of even the biggest tax frauds against the public purse.

I've long noticed a big disconnect between Hungary's "surplus" of taxes and bureaucratic heavy-handedness and its seeming shortage of high-profile tax fraud cases. But it wasn't until I decided to take a look around the local media for stories about the latter that the size of the gap became really striking.

Currently, the biggest story about tax fraud in Hungary involves a company called ScienNet, a rather shady outfit offering its clients discounts at a network of participating stores. Late last year, the head of the company, one Zsolt Leinemann (left), was arrested on charges of evading Ft 960 million (roughly €3.5 million) in taxes. Following a raid on the company's headquarters, the Customs and Finance Guard (VPOP) confiscated the firm's cash, as well as its computer servers, and in general shut the whole thing down.

While this might seem like a splendid example of the Magyar taxman doing his job, when you consider what might be called the "aggravating circumstance" of the case it is less impressive. Basically, ScieNet seems to have been targeted not just for swindling taxes, but also for running a pyramid scheme that may have drawn in as many as 400,000 "members." And the scale and scope of its alleged tax fiddle are nothing short of outlandish. For example, the company is a subsidiary of a US-based holding, used eleven different offshore companies, and is said to not even have had a local tax number.