Tax collection: two million notices and demands suspended throughout August

Up to two million tax demand notices, payment notices and reminders. The tax collection agency is preparing to scale back its activities in August in the interests of fairness towards both taxpayers and the professionals who assist them. This suspension is set to last for the entire month. Confirmation that the Revenue Collection Agency (Ader) will suspend ‘the service of all notices for the entire month of August, with the exception of urgent and unavoidable cases’ came in an official statement from the Revenue Agency. The statement sought to reassure the public that the two agencies ‘have managed to plan their respective activities in such a way as to avoid any overload in the months preceding or following those for which the legislator has ordered the suspension of notifications’.

This is a process that needs to be worked out in every detail, because pressing the ‘stop’ button on these notifications may not be as straightforward as it seems. Firstly, it must be borne in mind that notifications of tax collection proceedings do not all travel via the same channel. So whilst it may be relatively easy to set a timer to delay the dispatch of notices intended for taxpayers with a certified email account, the same cannot be said for those that are still sent in paper form. In this case, it is necessary to coordinate the plans of the Revenue Agency’s Collection Department (Ader) with the postal service provider to ensure that the timing actually works correctly. This is to ensure that, between 1 and 31 August, no taxpayer is left without receiving a document, not least because a tax demand notice being delivered would cause far more of a stir than all the others being held up.

Secondly, there is another aspect that should not be underestimated. From the perspective of tax authority–taxpayer relations, the reprieve is also helpful because receiving a tax collection notice is never a pleasant experience, and it is even less so in the middle of August. However, postponing by a month the entire volume of notices that Ader is required to process each year means that workflows must be carefully planned and defined. This is another reason why the Revenue Agency has specified that there is ‘no evidence’ of any ‘overload or abnormal concentration in specific periods of the year’. Moreover, the agreement with the Ministry of the Economy indicates that the total volume of documents to be sent and served for the current year ranges between 24 and 31 million: figures which, in fact, include tax assessment notices, demand notices and reminders. This leads to the estimate that, on a monthly basis, the volumes in question amount to a total of around two million documents. For this reason, the suspension measure was carefully assessed by the offices of the two agencies headed by Vincenzo Carbone.

Not least because it would have been counterproductive to suspend mailings in August only to overload those in the ‘adjacent’ months. Indeed, the tax authorities wished to clarify that: compliance letters scheduled for July account for 9 per cent of the annual total; notices of irregularities sent in July have so far fallen by 40 per cent compared with the same period in 2025 and account for 7.6 per cent of the annual total; the tax assessment notices for the first half of 2026, which Ader is required to produce on the basis of the cases assigned by the various creditor bodies, have fallen by 9 per cent compared with the same period in 2025.

Amidst all this talk of fair play and cooperation, we must not overlook the figures relating to tax collection in Italia. Starting with the staggering backlog that has built up since 2000 and which, by the end of last year, had reached 1,331 billion euros. The aim of the strategies has been to reduce, as far as possible, the time taken following the submission of claims by creditor bodies. The 2026–2028 agreement with the Ministry of the Economy sets out, amongst the objectives of the Revenue Agency’s Collection Department, the requirement to serve notices by the end of the third month following the month of handover for at least 53 per cent of the payment notices prepared on the basis of the cases entrusted by the creditor bodies, provided that the volume of cases entrusted is in line with normal trends. This objective should be considered alongside the target of €14.3 billion in total collections to be achieved by 2026. For whilst it is a principle of fiscal civility not to place a burden on taxpayers and advisers during the months set aside for holidays and rest, it should nevertheless be borne in mind that taxes, contributions and fines due (and which have already been contested because they have reached the collection stage) must be paid.