Exposed to public ridicule, but above all to public scrutiny, taxpayers' incomes will be published on the internet. To be precise, on the websites of the Municipalities. The Government decided it yesterday, including this measure in the already famous one “anti-evasion package” which should allow the State to scrape together in two years those 3,8 billion that went up in smoke with the abolition of the solidarity contribution. Jail is also envisaged for those who evade more than three million euros, an Ires surtax of 10,5% on shell companies and the obligation to indicate in the tax return the banks with which one has dealings. All this, according to Giulio Tremonti, will be sufficient to keep the balances of the encore maneuver "absolutely unchanged".
It's a pity that in the technical report of the State Accounting Office the accounts do not add up. As regards the dissemination of pay slips on the internet, the technicians have estimated a revenue of just 145 million in three years, even if it is a "prudential" calculation. In any case, the new initiative "will have a significant impact on the behavior of taxpayers - reads the technical report -, on the increase in business volumes and declared income and, consequently, the taxes due and paid".
On the other hand, it is not yet clear how incomes will be thrown to the web. Criteria and modalities will be established with a decree of the Prime Minister on the proposal of the Minister of the Economy, who will work in agreement with the State-City Conference. Actually the idea is not new. Vincenzo Visco tried it in 2008, when he was deputy minister in the second Prodi government, but the attempt was unsuccessful. The data remained online for just a few hours, just long enough for the Privacy Guarantor to intervene. After that, the Revenue Agency was forced to obscure those very interesting pages of its site.
Today things could be different, but it is not said yet. Of course, the guarantor Francesco Pizzetti continues to be cautious, and in an interview with Repubblica he speaks of incomes as an issue to be handled "very carefully". This is "terribly dangerous material", which could lead to forms of "social hatred, going beyond the limits and objectives of the new law if it were ever to be approved". Also because "the current system of consultation on paper" has "well-defined stakes", while online "the data published is difficult to erase".
The radical Rita Bernardini, a member of the Justice Commission in the Chamber, goes much further on the path of controversy, recalling that "of the 52 members of the Government, only the ministers Franco Frattini and Renato Brunetta and the undersecretary Aurelio Salvatore Misiti have signed the release form to put online your asset register on institutional websites. All the others have preferred to hide it from the citizens, despite the legal obligations".
