The road is not very clear, but the destination is: in the not too distant future, Italy will do without tax receipts. The Government wrote it in the last update of the Economics and Finance document and the director of the Revenue Agency reiterated it yesterday in front of the Chamber, Rossella Orlandi.
"In perspective - said the number one of the tax authorities - the implementation of complete traceability will lead to the abandonment of some tools that have proved ineffective such as tax meters and tax receipts, with lower costs for businesses and the progressive abandonment of massive controls on the territory by the financial administration”.
Not only. According to Orlandi, "it is a priority to encourage the use of traceable tools in every area, with particular attention precisely to the activities that address the final consumer", also to strengthen "the functions of selecting taxpayers to be subjected to control on the basis of significant indexes of greater risk of evasion".
In reality, a must it already exists: since last July XNUMX all traders, professionals and businesses must have a terminal Pos to allow customers to pay amounts exceeding 30 euros by credit card, prepaid card or debit card. The problem is that the vast majority of interested parties candidly ignored the new rule, as no fines or sanctions are foreseen. To fill this gap – but also to introduce incentives – the Treasury has set up a working table with the Bank of Italy, ABI, the Bancomat Consortium, Aiip (Italian Association of Payment and Electronic Money Institutions) and the Visa and Mastercard operators.
Still, not everyone is so enthusiastic about ditching the good old receipts. Starting with those who, in the early XNUMXs, introduced the tax receipt in our country: "After more than thirty years - said the former Minister of the Treasury Franco Reviglio in an interview with La Repubblica -, it seems to me that the receipt was a useful tool. It should be asked why it is now intended to go beyond it. Without a receipt, it seems to me difficult to effectively combat part of the evasion”.
But there are also those who believe that the fate of the receipt does not make much difference. The President of Censis Joseph DeRita, points out from the columns of the same newspaper that “the rapidly growing undeclared sector is not linked to consumption, but to work. It is a very different phenomenon from what we noticed forty years ago, when companies produced illegally, but after an initial irregular phase they then reached the surface. Today, the crisis and precariousness have completely changed the context: those who work illegally aim for total undeclared work, the money is not even deposited in the bank, but remains cash”.
Not to mention that, after all, getting around the Pos won't be more difficult than avoiding typing a receipt: it will be enough "not to transcribe the sale on the electronic recorder - concludes De Rita -, which in any case will continue to control a formal trade or a formal job". The farewell to paper therefore risks not being the Copernican revolution that everyone expects.
