In recent interview on FIRSTonline (Tax, to beat evasion the priority is to reduce erosion) the thought of Vieri Ceriani, rational, contrasts with the irrationality of experience, which makes the containment of evasion, through the punctual assessment of the tax debt, a non-secondary question of political choice.
Not only are parliamentarians divided when it comes to the use of techniques to counter tax evasion, e.g. on limits on cash payments. We see the same political forces orienting themselves differently on the use of already existing tools for the assessment of tax obligations: the left is configured as a fanatic of assessment; while from the right one would be willing to tolerate a certain margin of evasion. Years ago an authoritative character underlined to me the serious risk of popular subversion if we went too far in containing the widespread evasion in the area of minor trade, self-employment and the professions. Strange! The severity of the assessment of the tax debt it is neither right nor left; the differences, the political distinctions, should be, and end up, in the choices of the legislation that conforms the tax system.
In fact, if we go deeper into the phenomenon, political forces reflect feelings of the electorate. The citizen is less inclined to discuss the legal conformation of the tax system, unnecessarily complicated due to its disorderly, contingent, unjust development, as explained in the interview from which I took inspiration: "a kind of Harlequin dress". Instead, the voter feels involved when it comes to containing tax evasion. He can lose, but also win the election by showing a certain tolerance to the tax evader.
This feeling is irrational if we do not accompany it with the conjoined, understood feeling that the state which is the recipient of tax revenues he is incontinent of spending.
The taxpayer does not understand the correlation of revenues with expenses. On the one hand he suffers from the burden of tribute; on the other he complains inadequacies in the provision of services: the holes in the streets not only in Rome; unbearable expectations in healthcare, which force him, even improperly, into private life; difficult start of the school year; sinking of civil justice; exuberant administrative and para-administrative apparatus; positions and remuneration paid to personnel selected not always on the basis of competence; proliferation of spending centers in public companies; incomprehensible bailouts of private companies.
The voter of all the grass makes a bundle. He is not put in a position to decide on the correlation of income with expenditure: if you want public healthcare you have to pay a tax, which replaces the private price for the healthcare service or the insurance premium. In order to decide, the voter must find the service charge correlated, evaluate its efficiency, probably different according to the regions to which they belong, which would also justify different solutions, without prejudice to uniformity for the fundamental services. In Ceriani's interview the genesis of Irap is recalled, which responded to this logic. It should be emphasized that the extension of the public sphere to the welfare state justifies taxes with a specific destination.
Before that, in the national perspective, the transfer of social tasks to the territorial bodies would be justified, dislocating the expenses for services and the corresponding revenues. The concentration of sovereign functions (justice, military, etc.) in the State would make the evaluation of their efficiency more immediate. The independent authority entrusted with the review of expenditure efficiency would be the voter's eye on the use of the resources provided by the tax system, in the various articulations. So we can ask “greater collaboration between administration and citizens”.
In this last regard, I would like to add a significant reason for the crisis in the taxpayer's relationship with the tax authorities. The assessment procedure is thus uncertain in the phase of the surveys and in the continuation of the contradictory, to be perceived as vexatious, due to the presence of pecuniary sanctions that could rise to disproportionate amounts, also due to the threat of a penalty. Again these profiles stimulate the distrust of the citizen towards the tax institutions. It is a matter that the sensible legislator should face again at its roots.
Politics, instead of rethinking the adaptation of our state to the realities of Europe and the world, forces us to discuss the handcuffs to escapers.
I agree with Ceriani. Penal sanctions already exist with deterrent effects. Not only new penal repression is not able to strengthen, or worse to replace, the operations of the assessment; but it would end up increasing the criminal litigation, which, already suffocated, risks being nullified by the prescription, with useless costs for the community; perhaps a source of income for the legal professions.
But even before politics, journalism falls into the trap of the contingent, which escapes systematic thought as if they were theoretical abstractions: public discussion, deprived of the support of theoretical studies, necessarily remains forced to day by day; in handcuffs to the evaders.
