Imu, Tari and fines: from Turin to Palermo, here are the cities that are opening up to forfeitures

Tax amnesties have been a popular topic in Italy for more than a decade, in Parliament when there is talk of taxes and in municipal councils if there is the option of applying the amnesty also to Imu, Tari, fines and so on. This year, for the first time, there are even two possibilities: simultaneous but uncoordinated, daughters as they are of a regulatory evolution that has developed in fits and starts, and has had to seek continual compromises between the ambitions of reaching out to as many taxpayers as possible and the need not to shift the already strained public finance balances by an inch. Such a framework therefore promises to multiply the discussions; and the unknowns of the taxpayers who, for example, are not required to know to whom their debt has been entrusted, a decisive variable as we shall see in a moment.
The machine in any case has started, and already sees the outline of a panorama in which about 50% of the cities have decided to open the doors to an amnesty, or are about to do so. The passion for the amnesty seems a little more intense in the South, where on average the mountain of uncollected revenue is much higher. But the geography of the scrapping does not seem to know any rigid divisions, not even on the political level where some more coldness is encountered on the side of the administrations led by the centre-left.

Milan, Bologna and Florence, for example, have so far shown no intention of scrapping anything. And the approach is also cold in Brescia, Ravenna, Livorno and Perugia. But Turin, Rome and Naples, also centre-left, are going in a different direction, and so is Bari. Similar choices are also being made in Forlì and Pesaro, while among the centre-right municipalities, Palermo has started the paperwork to join and Catania is about to do so.

But not all scrappings are equal. On the contrary, as mentioned above, a particularly (and unintentionally) generous tax law offers two of them to entities and their taxpayers.
The first is the 'autonomous' facilitated definition born with the last budget law, which has fished out a provision of the legislative decree on federalism (approved in May 2025 to implement part of the tax delegation, it remained bogged down due to the opposition of municipalities and regions, dissatisfied with the proposed architecture for the IRPEF sharing). The budget law has therefore taken up and brought to the 'Official Gazette' a group of rules, which ended up in paragraphs 102 et seq. of Law 199/2025, allowing local administrations to introduce amnesties providing for 'the exclusion or reduction of interest or even penalties', provided that taxpayers honour their original debt. The rule is on a flat-rate basis, so there is no deadline by which municipalities must adhere to it. And it is up to the administrations to decide which revenues to allow to be remedied, with which discounts (reduction or zeroing) on interest and/or penalties, for which years, and at what rate of payment. This autonomous mechanism is, for example, the one chosen by Turin, which allows for amnesties in 36 months, with zero interest and penalties, of the debts entrusted to Soris (the local collection company) up to 2020, but flanked by a revenue-saving mechanism that requires taxpayers to pay any subsequent debts as well, without discounts, in a single payment or in 36 monthly instalments. In Bari, on the other hand, the idea is to include in the facilitated definition even the most recent debts, born up to the end of 2024, with a digital application procedure in the pipeline to cut time.

But these autonomous scrappings cannot in substance concern the files managed by the Agenzia delle Entrate-Riscossione, to which thousands of entities still entrust the hunt for their revenues. For them, there is the quinquies rottamazione, extended to local debts by the law converting the tax decree approved last week. Here, however, municipalities can only choose whether or not to opt in, without being able to affect the parameters, which are instead fixed: and require the amnesty to be applied to all tax bills issued between 2000 and 2023, deriving, however, from omitted payments and not from assessments, and to pay the due amount in 54 bi-monthly instalments of at least 100 euro each. Old interest and penalties are still set at zero, but the instalment facility calls for an annual rate of 3%. The municipalities have time to adhere until 30 June, but soon a corrective should grant an extra month to the entities that went to the polls on Sunday and yesterday, without changing the rest of the schedule that calls for taxpayers to adhere by 31 October and pay the first or single instalment by 31 January 2027. Among others, Genoa, Naples, and Palermo will move towards this pre-packaged arrangement, which, however, cannot concern debts collected by municipalities on their own or through private concessionaires registered in the register. And here comes a non-trivial problem.
Because in many municipalities the assignment to the national collection agent for some revenues coexists with other mechanisms for other items, and often the two systems overlap on the same revenue for different years. In these cases, it will be up to the administrations to decide whether to couple state and autonomous collection, providing similar rules: or whether to thicken with variables a maze that promises to disorientate many taxpayers.