Housing bonus, more fraud: nearly half a billion in 2025

Almost half a billion tax credits, derived from renovations that have had access to the housing bonus, already blocked during 2025. The long wave of building credit assignments, in their various forms, does not stop. Despite the freeze on the transfer of subsidies, imposed by the government between 2023 and 2024 to halt the mad race of public accounts, the effects of that season continue to be clearly visible in the verification activities of the Inland Revenue Agency, so much so that they still play a priority role in the anti-evasion plan.

In fact, the total of credits generated by invoice transfers and rebates reached the gigantic figure of 229 billion euro between 2020 and 2024. These credits, however, are then spent year by year, according to the instalment mechanism, when they materially land in the F24. In 2025, up to the end of May, EUR26 billion had been spent, mostly related to the superbonus (but also to the ecobonus, the seismbonus and the old facade bonus). The year before this account had reached EUR 42 billion.

So, while the circulation of subsidies goes on (and will continue for a long time yet), fraud, large and small, that has been perpetrated in the past years still continue to come to light: non-existent construction sites, simulated operations or inflated invoices. This is what the numbers made public by the director of the Revenue Agency, Vincenzo Carbone, say. "Since the end of 2021," he explained, "we have launched a systematic preventive control activity on credit transfer notices relating to building and energy-saving interventions. This is a particularly effective control, since by carrying out the ex ante control, the possibility of evasion is eliminated at the root. To date, through more than 92 thousand punctual investigations, we have prevented the misuse of credits for more than 7.5 billion".

What is surprising, however, is the evolution of these numbers. It is between 2022 (15,105 rejected notices), 2023 (29,667 rejected notices) and 2024 (37,717 rejected notices) that there is a very strong growth in the blockages of the Revenue. The majority of the investigations mentioned by the director of the Inland Revenue took place precisely in this three-year period: in total, the blocks made between 2022 and 2024 are worth 7 billion euro.

The surprise, at the tail end of these numbers, is that 2025 has not halted the run of these checks and related blockades, as the disposal bans might have led one to think. So far, and we are still talking about partial figures, 9,283 disposals worth over EUR 423 million have been stopped this year.