Between 2000 and 2020, the Italian tax authorities failed to recover almost 930 billion euros. Translated: 87% of the total sums subtracted from the Treasury, including fines and unpaid taxes, amounting to over 1,068 billion, remained in the pockets of the tax evaders. As if to say that the collection system has collected only 13% of the tax “load”, just 139 billion.
And, as if it were not enough to lose about 40 billion euros a year, the results are progressively deteriorating. The “debt collectors” were more effective at the beginning of the millennium than in more recent years: from 2000 to 2004, the percentage of sums collected remained stable above 20% (record in 2000 with 28%), while the annus horribilis, excluding 2020 in which the collection was “frozen” due to the Covid pandemic, it was 2019 with 4.3% of the amounts recovered compared to the total load.
This is what emerges from an analysis by the Unimpresa Study Center on the effectiveness of collection in our country, according to which in 2020, when the “ debt collectors ” were stopped in the pits for Covid, they arrived in the state coffers, with the collection, only 177 million, equal to 0.4% of the reference 49 billion for the year.
“The collection rules must be completely rewritten, but the restructuring must be included in the tax reform that the government has promised to prepare as part of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. The time for vertical interventions on single aspects or single areas of a discipline, the taxation one, devastated by decades of aberrant laws, cumbersome regulatory mechanisms, incomprehensible and above all unbearable taxation is over. A very long series of errors that led to the creation of a relationship between financial administration and taxpayer that was anything but fair and transparent “comments the vice president of Unimpresa, Giuseppe Spadafora according to which” the tax stock of the ‘debt collectors’ has actually exploded under bomb triggered by the inefficiency of the state ».
According to the analysis of the Unimpresa Study Center, which processed data from the Court of Auditors, the total burden of collection, progressively accumulated from 2000 to 2020, stands at 1,068.8 billion euros.