The so-called "tax on ATMs" will never see the light of day, but the tax authorities will be able to initiate checks and disputes on current accounts, even if not for all categories of workers.
1) THE “ATM FEE”
In reality, what the government backed down on was not a real tax on ATMs, but a penalty equal to 10-50% of the withdrawal (at the counter or at the ATM) which should have been triggered on unjustified operations, i.e. those not accounted for and in which the indication of the beneficiary is missing or inaccurate.
2) THE DECREE AND THE GOVERNMENT'S MARCH BACK
At the beginning of the summer, the application of this rule seemed certain, but on 4 September the Council of Ministers decided to cancel it from the decree on administrative tax penalties, one of the implementing provisions of the fiscal delegation. The text received the second preliminary go-ahead from the government and is now awaiting the latest opinion from the parliamentary commissions. Final approval should arrive by the end of the month.
3) CHECKS ON CURRENT ACCOUNTS IN THE EVENT OF UNJUSTIFIED WITHDRAWALS
The "tax machine tax", therefore, will remain a dead letter, but in the event of unjustified withdrawals, checks and disputes by the Revenue Agency may still be triggered on current accounts. For this type of suspicious transactions, in fact, the legal presumption will apply that the money withdrawn is higher compensation or undeclared revenues, or the result of evasion.
4) CATEGORIES AT RISK
However, the possibility of incurring this kind of tax dispute will not concern all taxpayers. On the contrary: following the indications of the Constitutional Court (sentence no. 228/2014) the government has also eliminated from the decree the automatic equalization of self-employed workers to entrepreneurs. Consequently, only pure entrepreneurs and those professional figures who - despite having characteristics more similar to those of self-employed workers - produce business income because they are paid with commissions on the deals concluded (for example financial advisors, agents of commerce and real estate brokers).
5) WHAT TO DO IN THE EVENT OF A DISPUTE
These categories, in the event of a dispute, will be required to provide "contrary and non-generic evidence" justifying the withdrawals considered suspicious by the tax authorities. On the other hand, as Circular 32/E/2006 from the Revenue Agency clarifies, those who carry out the checks are advised not to be too rigid, so as not to "neglect any demonstrations, even of a presumptive nature, that it is a matter of expenses not having fiscal relevance both for their smallness and for their occasional occurrence and, in any case, for their coherence with the standard of living comparable to the declared turnover".
