For Mr. Geniatakis, the arrival of the tax inspectors was the kind of showy government move that hurts the little guy but amounts to nothing. In these hard times, he and the other restaurant owners had pooled €1,000 each, about $1,380, for music and decorations, only to see their investment disappear with the crowds when the scuffle began.

“They are driving us crazy, but what about the Lagarde list?” he said, referring to about 2,000 tax evasion suspects with Swiss bank accounts whose names were turned over to Greek officials in 2010.

When a journalist, Kostas Vaxevanis, published the list last year, he was charged with infringement of privacy but was acquitted and is now being retried. So far, no one on the Lagarde list is facing legal action, though officials, answering questions in Parliament earlier this month, said 150 audits were under way. But it remained unclear how aggressive the investigation was.

An article in Eleftherotypia recently reported that the Lagarde list investigations and other high-profile cases were about to be moved from an elite auditing unit to local tax offices. Such a move, the newspaper said, would effectively end further investigations because the tax offices lacked the skills to quickly handle them. The paper quoted a senior finance ministry official as saying too much time had been wasted on investigating past fraud and that the focus should now be on new cases.

The Finance Ministry issued a brief statement denying the story. The next day, it asked Parliament to extend the statute of limitation on tax evasion by two years.

But the lack of visible action is one of the reasons many Greeks cite for their disdain for the tax collection efforts. Accountants say efforts to overhaul the tax code also have failed. “The goal was a simplified system,” said Antonis Mouzakis, a prominent tax accountant in Athens. “But what we have got now is not simplified. It is a mess.”

Anna Apostolou, an accountant who works mostly for small-business owners, said many of her clients just refuse to pay or turn to the courts, knowing that will tie up payment for years.