The countdown begins for the end of the tax return: within 5 years it will no longer be there because the tax authorities will present the processing of data to the citizen, which will only need to be checked. The director of the Revenue Agency Ernesto Ruffini paved the way in an interview at the opening of the Republic.
“Today there is the pre-compiled declaration”, he explains. “But I like to think that it is only an intermediate step between how we were and how we will be”. “The taxman must listen, confront.
And change”. As? “By accumulating more and more data and naturally avoiding asking for what we already have, the very concept of tax returns must disappear. When the tax authorities have all the data, it presents you with the processing of those same data and you from controlled become controller of the tax authorities”. Five years, he specifies, is "the possible horizon for this revolution to become fully operational". Ruffini then acknowledges that Italy has "a higher number of taxes than the European average" and that it is necessary to "drastically reduce the time" it takes to pay taxes.
“I don't like the term 'Fisco friend'”, he confesses, “friends are chosen. The taxman can be at most a relative”.
“We have to change our vision: the interlocutor of the Agency shouldn't be a tax code, but the citizen. With a capital C".
Ruffini says he is against amnesties and stresses that the scrapping of folders "is not technically an amnesty". "I believe that giving citizens the opportunity to comply without a drain on penalties and interests is not wrong".
The director adds that "it is unlikely" that just 1% of Italians will report more than 200 euros and hopes that in a system "that makes everything easier" there will be an increase in "the figure of spontaneous compliance with respect to the recovery of tax evasion".
In the Agency's plans there is also an advertising campaign "in the pipeline for 2018": "The taxman must be understood, in its usefulness at the service of all". "Taxes are the price we pay to live in this society." The giants of the web and the taxman? For Ruffini, "Minister Padoan has strongly raised this problem at international tables".
“There is an assumption of responsibility towards future generations. Because the digital economy represents the economy of the future and if the problem doesn't arise now, sooner or later we will have nothing more to tax”.
