The reform of the land registry inflames the debate in the government. On Tuesday 5 October, the League deserted the Council of Ministers on tax delegation precisely as a sign of protest against the revision of the cadastral estimates. Il Carroccio believes that the operation is a way to raise taxes on the house and Matteo Salvini has come to shake the bogeyman of the "patrimonial". The Democratic Party, on the other hand, accuses the Northern League of fueling an instrumental controversy with the sole purpose of diverting attention from the result of the administrations, disastrous for the center-right in the large Municipalities. To clarify Mario Draghi intervened, who on Wednesday from Slovenia reiterated what he had already said on several occasions: “The land registry reform is not a patrimonial one. This government does not touch the homes of Italians, nor raise taxes. The cadastre is an operation of transparency: why hide behind opacity and calculate taxes on the basis of numbers that make no sense? Isn't it better to shed some light?”.
1) REFORM OF THE LAND REGISTRY: WHY IS IT NEEDED?
The numbers Draghi talks about are the cadastral income, which in theory express the value of the property (or rather, the theoretical figures that could be obtained years ago by renting it) and are used to calculate taxes on the house. The problem is that many houses (an estimated one million) do not have a cadastral income, as they are illegal. In other cases, however, the value of the cadastral income was calculated so long ago (in the best case the end of the XNUMXs) that it is often unreliable. Not only because house prices have changed, but also because the owners or the State may have intervened on the property, renovating it or redeveloping the area in which it is located.
2) INJUSTICES TO BE CORRECTED
The result is that the tax authorities have a false image of Italian real estate assets and this produces a series of injustices. The typical example is that of the luxury house in the historic center which, when it comes to taxes, is still treated as a public house, a category it has not been included in for decades now.
3) LONG TIMES AND RISK INCREASE
With the reform of the cadastre, the aim is to eliminate these distortions, finally creating a truthful map of Italian properties. The operation is neither simple nor quick: the time required is five years, so the current situation will not change until at least 2026. However, governments will then be able to decide to use the new rents to calculate taxes on the house, which could then go up.
4) FROM ROOMS TO SQUARE METERS
Another problem concerns the method of calculating the estimates. Today, in the eyes of the taxman, the value of a small house with four rooms is higher than that of a larger house divided into three rooms. The reason is simple: in the past, the main criterion used to determine cadastral income was the number of rooms into which the property was divided. The land registry reform proposed by the Draghi government (and already unsuccessfully attempted by many other executives) aims to replace this parameter with the total number of square meters. In this way, the size of the property will become the most important criterion for calculating the cadastral income, which will therefore be closer to the market value (today light years away).
5) ASSET VALUE
Not only. The forthcoming reform also provides that each real estate unit, in addition to the cadastral income, is also attributed "the relative asset value and an income discounted on the basis, where possible, of the normal values expressed by the market". In addition, both asset values and annuities will need to be updated periodically to take account of real estate market fluctuations.
