Court of Auditors: only 17.7% of discovered evasion collected

17.7% of the amounts of evasion discovered translates into actual collections by the tax authorities: compared to the 72.3 billion assessed in 2024, 12.8 billion were actually paid out. This is what emerges from the analysis on State revenues carried out by the Corte dei Conti in the volumes accompanying the report on the General State Accounts. Within the general data, it emerges that the registrations on the role - the actual tax bills - see a firm collection at 3.1%: 40.7 billion are the amounts assessed, 1.3 billion those paid. A phenomenon for which the Court considers as "highly probable" the "correlation with deep-rooted expectations of subsequent scrapping or the belief of being able to evade subsequent enforcement action".

Not only that. The tax authorities do not ring twice. In a whole year, in 2024, it carried out substantial controls - those with accesses and inspections that do not rely solely on paper documents - on 1.4 per cent of taxpayers with entrepreneurial, self-employed or professional activities. Of the 9 million taxpayers in these categories, just over 129,000 were those who received a 'visit' from tax inspectors. That is an average of about one in seventy-one taxpayers. In practice, without acceleration, it would take a rotation of 71 years to check everyone. The figure, of course, does not take into account other types of assessment. This is what emerges from the Court of Auditors' elaborations on the frequency of substantive controls contained in the volumes accompanying the report on the General State Accounts. "It is therefore quite clear," the Court states, "how the probability of being concretely subjected to control is very low".

And 'the ratio between the number of taxpayers and the number of controls actually carried out,' the Court of Auditors points out, 'is of great importance for the purposes of the effective deterrence that substantive assessment action exerts on the behaviour of the taxpayers themselves'. The report indicates very low frequency indices in many cases, from agriculture to services. The trade and catering, health and entertainment sectors average between 1.3 and 1.7 per 100 companies visited. A focus on the smallest companies, those subject to the reliability indicators, shows one in 20 inspections for construction, one in 50 for real estate brokers.

On the control and assessment activity front, the Corte dei Conti also devotes an in-depth analysis to the audits carried out by the Agenzia delle Entrate on income tax returns for the three-year period 2019-2021, the last complete ones, also breaking them down by type of taxpayer. In 2021, the Agency sent 2.1 million notices of income tax irregularities to taxpayers-individuals, totalling some 4.5 billion in amounts due. But the payments stopped at EUR 448 million, 9.98% of the disputed amount. This then triggered the registration of about 2.7 billion: 61.27% of the evaded taxes. The situation is not so different for partnerships and corporations. The partnerships, according to the declarations, were found to have spontaneously paid 60% of the amount due. The remainder saw 52,000 notices of irregularities sent out, for a total of 53 million in tax: only 8.42% of the disputed amounts, amounting to 4.5 million, were, however, paid, so that 91.83% of the amounts considered irregular were then entered in the register. Corporations, which, however, marked a regularity rate of 93.7% with respect to what was declared for the 2021 tax period, saw contestations amounting to 2.1 billion but only 9.63% of these amounts were paid.

The irregularities highlighted on VAT were also significant: the agency sent 1.4 million notices of irregularities, for just under 9.6 billion contested taxes: but only 17.26% of this was paid, approximately 1.7 billion. This triggered the registration, with the sending of the file, for 5.7 billion euro. In the three-year period 2019-21, out of the 30 billion euro contested, only 5.2 billion were paid. "On average, tax collections requested as a result of notices of irregularities (not cancelled)," says the Corte dei Conti, "appear to constitute just over 16 per cent of the total requested. This is, therefore, a rather limited percentage of the total amounts due and not paid: the causes of this phenomenon should be the subject of careful analysis, since it is highly likely that they are correlated to deep-rooted expectations of subsequent scrapping or to the belief that it is possible to evade subsequent enforcement action".