Company cars: with the 30 June cut-off all employees are not equal before the tax authorities

For company cars, the long-awaited safeguard has arrived (only the Senate's ratification is missing), which, however, partially protects those who have placed orders by 2024. In the name of the green transition, in fact, the budget law has changed the mileage costs of cars granted in mixed use to employees, penalising cars with thermal engines (petrol or diesel) and hybrids. With the bills decree the government wanted to avoid some retroactive effects of the budget law, but left some stakes. Orders placed by 2024 are saved, but only if the company vehicle is granted to the employee for mixed use by 30 June 2025. We talk about this with Stefano Sirocchi, an expert from Il Sole 24 Ore.

The Budget Law revolutionises the regulation of company cars, but the application of the new rules, as written in the manoeuvre, produces a retroactive effect without any protection for those who placed their orders in 2024 without knowing that certain types of cars would be affected by large increases in taxation as of 1 January 2025 (the date on which the Budget Law came into force). The government's effort to find a solution, it must be stressed, has been there, but the deck is always short. The amendment approved in the Bollette decree, in fact, while saving contracts before 2025, creates possible unequal treatment. If the car will be delivered after 30 June 2025 - a watershed inserted only to contain costs in relation to the available resources (8.3 million) - even if it was ordered in 2024, the new tax regime will still apply, which raises to 50% the coefficient to be applied to the cost per kilometre for a conventional distance of 15 thousand kilometres. With increases for employees estimated at 66 per cent. And this, therefore, despite the fact that driver and company have placed the order with rates and taxation in force in 2024.

"The axe is precisely the date of 30 June. Because the legislator,' says Sirocchi, 'in the amendment to the Bills Decree, in finding a solution to this issue of orders with delivery 2025, has essentially set an expiry date, that of 30 June, which is the final date on which the cars can be granted by applying the regime in force on 31 December 2024'. But beware, this is a final deadline on which companies and employees cannot intervene and is not in their hands. The delivery time of a car, in fact, depends on several exogenous factors such as the production of the vehicle, possible faults in the car or trivially in transport delays.

The watershed at this point, with the Bills Decree, has become the term 'granted'. But what is meant by vehicles 'granted' for mixed use by employees? When is the concession triggered for the purposes of applying or not applying the tax sting? When the vehicle is registered, when it is assigned, or when it is handed over? 'The discipline explicitly refers to a contract that is concluded between company and driver,' explains Sirocchi, 'and therefore between employee and company. It is a bilateral agreement between the parties, which is precisely the watershed moment in which the discipline to be applied is defined. It is important to emphasise, however, that, as we wrote in Il Sole 24 Ore last December, and then recently reiterated in an Assonime circular, in fact precisely because it is a contract, this agreement could also be entered into before the vehicle arrives, provided that the contract indicates the make and model of the vehicle selected'.

But the doubts about the new company car regulations do not only stop at the time when the vehicle is granted. There is, for example, the case of a vehicle registered in 2024 and then reassigned in 2025 to a different employee, e.g. due to retirement or resignation of the previous user. What happens in these cases? "This is a type that is not regulated either in the budget law or in the amendment to the Bills Decree," Sirocchi points out. "Following what was previously clarified by the Revenue Agency in Resolution 46 of 2020, the IRS basically stressed that in the absence of precise rules, general rules should be applied. These general rules, in the specific case of the fringe benefit, mean quantifying the normal value of the benefit and thus basically using the criteria of Article 9 of the Income Tax Consolidation Act and thus having a gross market value of the benefit from which to deduct the costs relating to the employee's commuting to work'. Yet another small or big folly, depending on how you read it, of the company car squeeze.