The political game
How this was possible today is no longer a question pertaining only to bureaucracy. a political problem, on the eve of the most difficult budget law in recent years. Within the Mef structure, we are beginning to suspect that, by leveraging the costs of the bonuses, an operation is underway to impeach the State Accountant Biagio Mazzotta and weaken his veto power in the face of any risky moves in the budget law. An observer notes: The first no to an uncovered measure, decided in view of the European elections, they will say that Mazzotta is the one who let the Superbonus disaster pass. But what? A reconstruction of the documents between the start of the housing relief in mid-2020 and last year shows a more complex reality and a general fragility of the administrations. The technical reports on the impact of the measures, by regulation, come from the Finance Department of the Mef, based on data from the Revenue Agency and the energy agency Enea.
The underestimated estimates
Something seems to have gone wrong here. For example, the technical report of the measure at the end of 2020 which extends the bonuses well into 2022 in the budget law of the time: it takes into account 200 million more debt in 2022 and two billion this year. A colossal underestimation. The rest of the criteria are indicated in the technical report to the May 2020 decree, the one that gives the go-ahead to superbonuses: Estimates carried out by applying a method similar to that used on existing deductions, i.e. those between 35% and 65% in force until At that time. In essence, the Finance Department seems to have made a linear projection of the costs of the ecobonus at 65%. Instead, the progression of costs was exponential, driven as it was by the fact that the homeowner paid nothing and could use all of his tax credit as transferable money. It remains to be seen whether Mazzotta could have rejected the estimates of the technical reports and refused to approve the bonuses due to lack of coverage.
The contradictions of the Mef
Here the MEF’s contradictions come to the surface: apparently the Accounting Office never had access to the models used by the Finance Department for its estimates, so it could only take them literally. Perhaps it was the task of the minister, Roberto Gualtieri at the time, to make the structures work together. Certainly an examination of the documents reveals how from the beginning, from mid-2020, politicians knew that the scenario which then came true in 2023 was very likely: the European statistical agency Eurostat forced Italy to be transparent and correct (a lot) of the I increase the deficits from 2020 to 2022 due to the house bonuses.
Mazzotta’s (unheeded) opinions
Mazzotta had warned them immediately that it would happen because the tax credits were transformed into unlimited tax money. He had already done so during the conversion into law in July 2020 of the Superbonus decree, envisaging the risk of an immediate impact on the deficit; but his contrary opinions on articles 119.93 and 121.42 of the law were not heeded. He had also done so with two memos dated December 2021 and October 2022 to Mario Draghi’s government and with a contrary opinion (not listened to) on the increasingly extreme freedom in making tax credits transferable and exploitable granted in the first budget law of government of Giorgia Meloni. In part, the loosening of the rules derives from an interpretation provided by the Revenue Agency on 25 August 2022. The Accounting Office in parliament predicts: Particular critical issues on the 2023 net debt. Here we are.
