Prison from six months to two years for unpaid debts. This is what emerges from the draft of the new delegated decree on tax reform. That’s not the only news. The government backtracks on the income meter. “We have always been against invasive mechanisms such as the income meter, applied to honest people and our position has not changed,” Giorgia Meloni said yesterday.
While waiting to understand how the decree will be modified, today what ends up under the lens of the income meter and what triggers the controls? In practice, the Revenue Agency can verify discrepancies between the real income and that declared by a taxpayer by analyzing his spending capacity, therefore the standard of living supported: if it is so high as to be incompatible with the income declared to the tax authorities, and if the gap exceeds 20%, the assessment notice is triggered. This tool is not new, in fact the tax authorities have had it for almost 50 years, born in 1973, but as we know it, it was introduced by the last government led by Berlusconi, in 2010.
Subsequently, in 2015 the Renzi government decided to eliminate the Istat averages tool. In 2018 the yellow-green executive led by Giuseppe Conte had frozen the instrument with the Dignity Decree, canceling the 2015 implementing decree and postponing the reformulation of the calculation of the presumed income to another decree. Reformulation never arrived in these seven years, until Leo’s decree. This latest version had to be applied from the 2016 tax year – but the incomes analyzed had to be those starting from 2018 – by referring to the “presumed minimum expenditure representative of the value in use of the good or service considered”. The expenses, “broken down by groups and categories of consumption of the taxpayer’s family unit, are taken from the annual survey on household expenses” by Istat. A long list would have ended up under the magnifying glass, from food, drinks, clothing and footwear, through to mortgages, rents and imputed rents, and leasing. The list also included water, consumption of electricity, gas, heating, purchase of household appliances and many other items of common and daily use.
The Revenue Agency would have added up all the expenses of the taxpayer and his dependent family members, the asset increases, the savings quota: if the amount exceeded 20% of the declared income, the assessment was triggered. You had to demonstrate how you came into possession of a larger sum – for example, an inheritance – or you would then have to pay new taxes.
«The ministerial decree published in the Gazzetta these days finally places limits on the discretionary power of the Financial Administration to implement the summary assessment, i.e. the possibility of the Tax Office to challenge the taxpayer for inconsistencies between purchases, standard of living and declared income.
