Goodbye redditometer. Assessments with a threshold of 20% of the declared amount and 70,000 euro deviation

More targeted checks also thanks to risk analysis to focus on large evaders or those who declare nothing to the tax authorities. The publication in the 'Official Gazette' of the corrective decree on the concordato preventivo (Legislative Decree 108/2024) sends the season of the redditometro definitively into the archives. The objective of the majority forces, on which the Deputy Minister of the Economy Maurizio Leo found a technical settlement, which then led to the signature of the Head of State on the measure, was to arrive at an instrument that would no longer be able to strike across the board, but would target large deviations. There is, in fact, a double threshold of which the tax authorities will have to take into account before proceeding with the assessment: on the one hand, it is confirmed that the discrepancy between income reconstructed through expenses incurred and income actually declared must be at least 20%, and on the other hand, there is a further limitation that the discrepancy must be at least ten times higher than the annual social allowance (currently 6.947.33 euro), i.e. just under 70,000 euro. Let us give an example to clarify. Under the old rules, in the presence of a declared income of 10,000 euro, it would have been sufficient for the tax authorities to reconstruct an income of 12,500 euro through the taxpayer's expenses in order to take the first step towards contesting an evasion, but now the red alarm will only go off in the presence of a reconstructed income of just under 80,000 euro.

The intention is clearly to reduce the number of so-called 'false positives' as far as possible and to target controls on cases where there is actually a high level of evasion. For this too, however, there will be safeguards to prevent indiscriminate targeting. First through risk analysis, then through the possibility of justification of any other income or accumulated savings or replication with respect to disputed expenses. Risk analysis is part of a strategy started already with the first implementing decree of the tax delegation) on the arrangement with creditors and assessment (Legislative Decree 13/2024). The effort is to arrive at using the new technologies (including artificial intelligence) and the databases available to the financial administration from a perspective that is not only deterministic, by cross-referencing the available information and verifying any 'shortcomings' of the taxpayer, but also in probabilistic terms, i.e. trying to identify phenomena of evasion into which controls can then be dropped. A task force composed of the Revenue Agency and the Guardia di Finanza is already at work in this direction, and they are starting to reason through the Upar (risk analysis unit) on the solutions to be put in place, which will naturally have to comply with privacy rules.

In any case, the new evasometer provides ample leeway for the taxpayer (and his defenders) to justify the discrepancies between declared income and incurred expenses that end up under the tax authorities' lens. With the amendment contained in the corrective decree of the Concordat, the rules are in fact standardised between the pure synthetic assessment and the one that should then be traced back to the elements of contributive capacity defined by a ministerial decree (the last in order of time has been frozen with the act of address signed by Leo and Finance Director Spalletta pending the overall revision of the rules to appease the political controversy that arose in the election campaign for the European elections). In both cases, in fact, the taxpayer will always be able to prove that the financing of the expenses took place with income other than that held in the same tax period, or with income that is exempt or subject to withholding tax or, in any case, legally excluded from the formation of the taxable base, or by parties other than the taxpayer. But not only because there will be room to explain that and expenses attributed have a different amount and that the share of savings used for consumption and investments was formed during the previous years.