In the case of refused building amnesty, the prescription for the restitution of the sums paid by way of donation is ten years. This is what emerges from the sentence 00682/2022 of the Lazio TAR. The story concerns a woman who presents an appeal for “the verification of the right to the repayment of the sums paid, as heir of the spouse, by way of donation in relation to two building amnesties presented by the deceased husband”. In the appeal he points out that the two applications (1986 and 2004) were rejected in 2005. In the middle there is also an appeal to the TAR, with which the two measures are challenged and the demolition of the artifacts deemed unsafe by the Municipality and the renunciation of the proposed appeal.
In 2014 the lady presented the request (later repeated in 2015) for the repayment of the sums paid by way of donation, in addition to interest. The woman then goes to the TAR and argues that the ten-year limitation period should be applied instead of the three-year one. The Inland Revenue, constituted in court, asks for the appeal to be rejected.
For the judges, the appeal must be accepted. The three-year statute of limitations applies only in the case of «sums due as an adjustment, arising from the silent assent on the application for amnesty. It follows, given the substantial specialty of the provision, the inapplicability of the short term to cases in which, such as the one in question, the amnesty procedure is defined with a rejection order “. Not only that: “In such cases, in which the denial implies the emergence of a right to reimbursement of charges unduly paid, the action for the repetition of the amount paid is prescribed within the ordinary ten-year term”. And this term runs “ordinarily, from the moment in which the Administration adopts the provision rejecting the amnesty”.
With regard to the calculation of the limitation period, for the judges the “ten-year limitation period, which therefore began to run from March 2011 – reads the device -, had evidently not expired at the time of submitting the related application to the Revenue Agency , which took place on May 22, 2015 “.
