The tax system is proving increasingly inadequate to usefully play its role in the face of an economy and society transformed by digital technologies. Thus the Finance Commission of the Chamber has launched a fact-finding investigation aimed at identifying the lines of a reform of both the tax regulatory framework and the administration.
The fact-finding investigation, deliberated by the commission in agreement with the Presidency of the Chamber, will last four months, during which representatives of the institutions, of the production system as well as experts and scholars of the digital economy and tax systems will be heard. The reflection will not be limited to national problems, but will be extended to the supranational dimension Among others, representatives of the European Commission and the OECD will also be heard.
In the document approved by the commission as a basis for the work in the pipeline, it is noted that digital technologies constitute the triggering element of an evolution which has involved practically all sectors of economic and social life and which has taken on the characteristics of a real own planetary revolution. In recent years, technological transformations have innovated production processes, value creation mechanisms, financial and credit structures and, more generally, the economic-political relationships between countries and economic systems.
Compared to the previous revolutions that have characterized the evolution of the planet in the last three hundred years, the digital one has the peculiarity of having imprinted a hitherto unknown speed on evolutionary processes, undermining not only the previous production and commercial structures, but also the legal structures -institutional which constitute the reference frame of the economic dynamics.
It is therefore necessary to evaluate what are the effects on the level of the tax system of the digital evolution underway in economic processes, both as regards intangible assets, such as knowledge and information content, and as regards material assets and the related production processes , logistics and distribution, both as regards the financial markets and the operations of subjects operating in this area.
The fact-finding investigation will serve to evaluate the objective obsolescence of the tax system at both the Italian and supranational level, which in many areas has now demonstrated its inability to keep up with the process of digital evolution, producing, in fact, distorting phenomena of improper tax competition as well as opening spaces for tax avoidance or evasion.
The objective of the work of the Finance Commission will then be to identify and report the corrective measures to be made to the mechanisms of taxation and the operations of the financial administration as well as the most suitable strategies placed at the foundation of the tax reform to accompany and support economic development in the era of the digital economy; in summary, what are the reform interventions of the current tax regulatory framework as well as the related administrative structures that manage and apply it.
