There are around 600 deductions and discounts that have a negative impact on the taxman: a "significantly increased" number compared to the 242 listed in the annex to the state budget. The photograph comes from the working group set up at the Ministry of Economy and dedicated to erosion led by Vieri Ceriani, head of the Bank of Italy's Fiscal Relations service. Ceriani was heard by the House Finance Committee regarding the delegation to the government for the tax reform.
If we want to deforest this harvest of regimes that allow for tax relief, "the reformer will not be able to avoid - reads the documentation filed by Ceriani - an examination and careful scrutiny of the individual measures, to decide on their conservation, suppression or reduction. Some measures included in the list of tax expenditures, such as personal income tax deductions for employees or dependent family members, are structural aspects of the current tax system and it seems appropriate that their eventual abolition or reduction be included in the context of more wide-ranging, which contemplate its effects and consider all its implications. Other measures – explains Ceriani – are aimed at avoiding double taxation, at making our legal system compatible with the Community one and with international agreements, or at favoring the emergence of taxable income; for other measures, the suppression could lead to problems of compatibility with constitutionally guaranteed principles".
For this reason, the working group - which met 15 times and will continue to continue - has classified the different discounts into 13 groups, from measures that avoid double taxation to those aimed at welfare interventions, from socially relevant measures to aimed at simplifying the system.
And in answering a question posed by a deputy, Ceriani remarked on the "technical difficulty" of a possible recourse to tax amnesties, in the light of the sentence of the Court of Justice on VAT: each amnesty is in any case connected to activities which include the VAT - he explained - and therefore this path is not practicable. Only the path of amnesty on direct taxes would remain, but it is a really complicated issue. And he warned against the risks associated with the safeguard clause contained in the maneuver just approved: the markets - he explained - seem skeptical of the political capacity to implement those objectives, and this would also explain the current differential with government bonds of other countries.
