The theme of today's conference pertains to the role of the tax authorities in the recovery of the economy and in the development project of our country. The risk is that even in the fiscal field, as in other sectors of the legal system, there will be oscillations between a dangerous stagnation and a hyper-activism made up of episodic initiatives and not coordinated with each other. Suffice it to consider, on the one hand, the events of the recent fiscal delegation and, on the other, the issue of the spending review and tax incentives.
Tax delegation is very important for the business world. It differs from previous initiatives because it does not pursue an organic rearrangement of the material nor a codification; objectives, these, certainly appreciable but which would have required too much time and effort, with the risk of wrecking the project. The intent of the delegation is, more simply, to resolve some issues of immediate relevance on which the tax system has long stalled and, in doing so, to found the relationship between taxpayers and the tax authorities on new foundations of certainty and transparency. The responses to this approach are: the organic arrangement of the discipline of tax incentives, expunging the obsolete and sectoral ones; the no longer postponeable revision of cadastral income, characterized by a clear inequality between recent and remote registrations; the rationalization of the rules for determining business income, with particular regard to the tax regulation of cross-border transactions, to bring it into line with international best practices. Above all, the delegation offers the tools to restore certainty and predictability to the tax relationship, while promoting greater collaboration between the tax authorities and the tax payer and greater proportionality of the sanctioning system.
These aspects are intimately connected to each other; the implementation of the delegation could actually be able to mark a profound change of course. Well, despite the general acknowledgment of the validity of the objectives and the essentiality of the proposal, the fiscal delegation has been blocked in Parliament for more than a year since the presentation of the relative bill, and only in recent days has the parliamentary process finally resumed Meanwhile, vice versa, in the incentive system we are witnessing a succession of the most varied legislative initiatives, without an overall design and in contrast with the need, albeit unanimously recognized, to simplify and reduce tax breaks, also in the light of the massive empirical evidence that confirms its primarily distortive nature.
Attachments: Speech in Assolombarda by the President Maurizio Sella_3 February 2014_WEB VERSION.pdf
