It has happened to almost all companies and freelancers: a Pec or a registered letter with a tax bill from the Revenue Agency asking us for thousands of euros, even if we are up to date with payments. An error resulting from falsified databases, which do not communicate well with each other. And all this translates into inconvenience for the citizen or the entrepreneur. Now it is Parliament – the supervisory commission – that is strongly denouncing the problem. Caused by an ancient phenomenon, which it was hoped solved: the PA databases do not “interoperate”.
This is how we read in the survey Digitization and interoperability of tax databases, approved by the parliamentary supervisory commission on the tax registry.
And this problem is also, to all intents and purposes, an offense because – writes the commission – in this way the “once only” principle, already provided for by the law, is violated. The one according to which the PA cannot ask for a document that it should already have. A principle that, despite being “shared almost unanimously, by the professional and productive categories” has so far been “largely disregarded, despite the repeated attempts by the legislator to impose its application”, we read.
And this is no small problem. It is this useless bureaucracy that penalizes Italian entrepreneurship, according to various international studies (such as those of the World Bank). The cost is 11.5 billion euros a year for SMEs, according to the Cgia of Mestre. The cost of bureaucracy is estimated by Assolombarda between 108,000 euros for a small business and 710,000 euros for a medium-sized company. dimensions; with an impact of time lost between 45 and 190 days spent by a dedicated collaborator.
The parliamentary investigation
In the survey, we read that the institutions seem to work “in watertight compartments without real interchange and work as a whole”. “It is not always possible to detect an active and collaborative dialogue between the central public administration and the productive world on the one hand, and the local public administrations on the other.” , says Daniele Tumietto, digital expert accountant.
«Years ago a process of reorganization of the databases of the Revenue Agency began, according to the rules of interoperability. We are halfway across the ford; the taxpayer data are still scattered among different databases, which do not speak to each other – he continues. This is why the Agency sometimes asks us for data that it should already have, confirming payments we have already made; it also happens that credit reconciliations escape us and therefore we are forced to provide this data again ».