Super bonuses and facade bonuses and, to a lesser extent, the Transition 4.0 incentives “have had a marked impact on public finances, also leaving a heavy legacy on the future, with a difference between the results and expectations that is “macroscopic in the case of the Super bonus” and which “is not has precedents”, especially for the expansion of the objectives and the repeated extensions. This is what theParliamentary Budget Office (Upb) in the memorandum on the bill being examined by the Senate.
As of March 1, 2024 the amount of Super bonus in the period 2020-23 it amounted to approximately 170 billion, we read. What was detected in terms of economic competence in the four-year period 2020-23 will impact, at a debt level, above all on the three-year period 2024-26: an annual average impact of 0.5% of GDP in the three-year period 2021-23 will be followed by a higher burden high equal to approximately 1.8% in the subsequent one.
The explosion in the costs of the Superbonus pushes us to rethink the benefits, firstly hypothesizing a rate such “as to incentivize worthy behavior” without placing the expense “totally borne by the State”. Furthermore, the subsidy “should be selective with regard to both the incentivized activities and the beneficiaries” and should be subjected “to prior authorizations” without automatic mechanisms, writes the PBO, suggesting replacing the current subsidy “with a monetary transfer (a contribution directed towards spending), modulated based on the economic condition of the family unit and the energy class of the building, subjected to prior authorizations and subject to a spending limit, or with subsidized loans”.
The Parliamentary Budget Office explains in more detail that “evident factors have contributed to the “macroscopic” difference between results and cost expectations, since its introduction, although difficult to predict the extent of the effects, linked to the specific characteristics of the measure, and others which occurred as consequences of these”. Among what contributed to an expenditure that was significantly higher than expected, the PBO identifies first of all the high percentage of the subsidy, which meant that the incentivized expenditure was entirely borne by the State “effectively eliminating the conflict of interests between the buyer and supplier”.
Then there is the setting of higher subsidized expenditure ceilings than those envisaged for other incentive interventions relating to properties; the attraction of interventions already incentivized with lower rates (driven interventions) within the scope of subsidized spending; the possibility of benefiting from the relief through the discount on the invoice and the transfer of credit, which has broadened the range of beneficiaries to incompetent or partially incompetent individuals and to those who would not have had sufficient liquidity to start construction work; the automaticity of the benefit; the lack from the beginning of prior authorization mechanisms “which would have made it possible to insert a spending ceiling without damaging the acquired rights of the beneficiaries”.
Among the factors that intervened subsequently, there are the progressive extension of the validity of the measure from the end of 2021 to the end of 2025 (with a rate of 110 percent until the end of 2023); the effects of the announcement of rules aimed at limiting the use of benefits which have led, at times, to accelerations in certifications and in the completion of the works; the increase in the prices of raw materials and construction materials as a consequence, in addition to the general increase in the prices of energy goods, of the increased demand for work and the elimination of the conflict of interests between buyer and supplier; the emergence of fraudulent phenomena “since the control system is essentially based on certifications from private entities”.
Although in the three-year period 2021-23 the actual overall revenue loss resulting from the incentives for Transition 4.0 companies is still lower than that initially estimated, its temporal evolution highlights risks of growing revenue losses. The data of the compensations carried out in the first three months of 2024 already represent 70 percent of the total estimated for the whole year (4.6 billion)”, underlines the PBO.
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