European Commission released a short clip titled “Missing Part” showing how tax fraud and tax evasion affect lives of European citizens and communities. It says one fifth of public money in Europe is lost to tax fraud and tax evasion and appeals to help EU countries to tackle this problem.

However, there is another point of view. And Lithuanian Free Market Institute (LFMI) inserted subtitles to illustrate how much money Lithuanians miss due to taxes and released “The Real Missing Part” clip. Within 4liberty.eu network, organizations share ideas and best practices. LFMI offered partner organizations to prepare the localized versions of the clip. Institute of Economic and Social Studies (INESS) grasped this opportunity and prepared Slovak version of the remake. It can be found here. It says every day a half of your money goes to the state. It is your money.

We released it on January 7 2014 and it attracted relatively poor attention. However, on January 21, it appeared in major Czech weekly Reflex and became of the most read article of Reflex’ website. In two days, it received almost 5,000 Facebook likes and video views rocketed to 40,000. The very same day, inspired by Reflex, it appeared in popular Slovak Omediach.sk (About Media) and received additional hundreds likes and views. Another day, No. 2 Slovak tabloid Plus 1 Den published the same story and its website. They also inserted a poll, where, out of thousands people participating, 81% people identify high taxes as a bigger problem than tax evasion and tax fraud.

Paradoxically, the Slovak remake of the clip received more views in two days than official European Commission video in 6 months.

The whole story illustrates how cooperation between partner organizations within the network can multiply the message and reach much broader audience.

This is to thank LFMI for such a great idea definitely worth replicating.

Richard Ďurana

INESS