The creation of the new database of current accounts and other financial relationships has entered the implementation phase. Banks, Italian post offices, collective investment organizations and asset management companies have sent the tax authorities all the information relating to the year 2011, as required by the so-called "Save Italy" law decree, adopted by the Monti government. And by the end of March they will also have to send the same information for the year 2012. For 2013 they will have until April 20 next year.
Thus, the Revenue Agency has a new, powerful weapon for the search for tax evasion, which together with the new income meter and the expense meter will be used to identify taxpayers who present values that are inconsistent with those declared to the tax authorities and , therefore, which can be subjected to inductive tests. In practice, taxpayers will be asked to justify their standard of living resulting from these instruments, in comparison with the levels of declared income.
In addition to bank current accounts, fiscal monitoring will also concern securities deposit accounts, asset management, credit and debit card movements, the number of extra-account transactions, certificates of deposit, savings bonds, derivative contracts and even the purchases or sales of gold and precious metals. And even the safety deposit boxes will be monitored in some way: not directly for what they contain, but for each access that the holders will make, since the credit institutions must also communicate this information to the tax authorities.
It is still unclear how the Revenue Agency will use all this information. It will have to provide Sogei with the criteria for cross-referencing these financial data with all the other information already present in the Tax Registry for each tax code, including asset type information. These criteria will determine the extraction of the lists of suspect taxpayers, which will be submitted to the territorial offices for their assessment activities.
With the new register of current accounts, the last shred of banking secrecy falls in Italy. The first attempts to lift the veil on taxpayers' financial reports began in the early 90s under pressure from the Guardia di Finanza, but at the time they were stemmed by the Ministry of the Treasury, which was separate from that of Finance, concerned above all not to introduce elements that would increase the risk of capital flight from our country. They were different eras and tax havens were thriving around the world.
The legislation allowed access to bank data only to the heads of the Guardia di Finanza and the Ministry of Finance, in addition to magistrates, but limited to investigations that had already started and are in progress and not in a massive way, as elements of triggering fiscal controls.
Only in 2006 was the first version of the current account registry launched, with the creation of a database of the tax authorities containing the indication of all existing bank relationships and their owners, but without information on the values of current accounts and related movements .
Then in 2011 the "Salva Italia" decree ordered the completion of the database with the values of the balances at the beginning and at the end of the year as well as the total credits and debits recorded during the year, which banks and other financial institutions have now begun to transmit to the IRS.
