For the Voluntary disclosure we need a real extension, not the compromise mini-postponement decided last Monday by the Revenue Agency. This is the request addressed to the government by Italian accountants and other intermediaries involved in the procedures for the repatriation of illegally exported capital.
The law – we recall – establishes that the tax evader must pay all unpaid taxes, but with discounts on penalties and interest and without the risk of incurring the penalties envisaged for tax crimes committed or for the new crime of self-laundering. The problem is the deadline.
Times are now very tight, because the legislation sets the 30 September 2015 the deadline for activating the procedure (for violations committed up to 30 September 2014). However, up to now some important delays have accumulated which have discouraged adhesions: the tax authorities, for example, only clarified some interpretative doubts last month, while only on 2 September did the law enter into force cancels the doubling of the assessment terms (effectively halving the price to pay for capital to re-emerge).
These innovations (especially the second one) have meant that many taxpayers decide only at the last moment to contact an accountant to adhere to the voluntary disclosure, but by now it is too late: seven out of 10 applications are still on the waiting list and professionals are forced to turn down many assignments.
This situation, of course, not only damages the accountants' firms, but also the public coffers: in fact, by renouncing last-minute subscriptions, the Treasury also renounces the revenue that these would have produced (the extraordinary one linked to the voluntary and the ordinary one guaranteed every year by the taxation on the re-emerged capitals).
To find a compromise between the requests of the operators and the position of the Treasury, which does not want to postpone the times for joining the procedure, on Monday the Revenue has announced a technical extension: the application must always be submitted by 30 September, but to attach the documentation necessary and the explanatory report is granted an extra month.
However, this solution does not satisfy the accountants and does not reduce the impact that the tight deadline can have on the overall proceeds of the operation. For this reason, in recent days the hypothesis has taken shape that the government may give the go-ahead in extremis a a full extension, which you move to the 31th December the deadline not only for sending the documentation, but for the application for membership itself.
