Incentives, reform postponed to the manoeuvre. Mimit v. Accountancy

The reform of business incentives became a government case. On the one hand the Ministry of Enterprise and Made in Italy (Mimit), which proposed the legislative decree, and on the other the State Accounting Department, which stamped it. To speak of a measure emptied of the initial scheme is directly the General Directorate for Business Incentives of Mimit, in a memorandum filed with the Senate's Industry Committee and the Chamber's Productive Activities Committee, which are conducting a series of hearings with a view to formulating an opinion. The directorate of the ministry headed by Adolfo Urso emphasises that there is a 'substantial difference' between the legislative decree scheme preliminarily approved by the Council of Ministers on 27 March and the text then stamped by the State General Accounting Office on 31 March.

"First of all, in terms of content, the decree is totally emptied and deprived of its central and pregnant part," continues the note sent to the commissions. "With the current version, in fact, the precise provisions that would have regulated the rationalisation and reorganisation of the MIMIT's incentive offer are completely removed. With referral to the budget bill, following the decree's entry into force.

The decree, together with the already enacted Incentives Code, constitutes a commitment under the NRP. The aim of the decree is to repeal a number of low-draft measures and divert resources to more effective instruments. The initial part of the measure has not been changed. The new architecture envisages a reorganisation of Mimit's incentives starting from five instruments: the Guarantee Fund for small and medium-sized enterprises, the Venture Capital Support Fund, the New Sabatini, incentives for the aerospace sector, and the Fund for Sustainable Growth with an extension of its scope to new sections (research, development, and innovation; business start-ups; productive investments for the green and digital transition; access to credit and the capital market). A framework regulation for each section and individual implementation calls should complete the architecture. The Ragioneria's changes instead focused on Article 9 with which Mimit defined the 'Accounting and financial provisions for the implementation of the Sustainable Growth Fund's interventions', in practice how to channel the resources that will derive from the repealed measures into this container. Now everything is postponed to the budget law. Qualified sources in the Ministry of the Economy defend the choice made by the Ragioneria, dictated by the task of supervising public finances and, it is noted, by the need to avoid that in the future, on the subject of incentives, traumatic experiences such as those of the superbonus can be replicated, with due proportion. From a technical point of view, there are several objections raised by the Ragioneria, especially with reference to Article 9, where the abolition of incentives is envisaged by generically referring to the fact that they flow into the Growth Fund, without considering that resources budgeted as legislative factors can only be changed by primary legislation and that a reform of this magnitude must start in a new financial year. Hence the need to wait for the budget law.

According to Mimit's management, however, the amended version of the decree does not 'in any way go beyond the framework currently in force in terms of regulations and allocation of resources' and therefore 'no substantial reorganisation of the discipline is implemented, on the contrary, with the immediate effect of further increasing the complexity of the panorama of incentives for companies'.

Urso's ministry, with reference to the postponement of the budget law, also speaks of an anomaly in terms of the procedure of parliamentary delegation to the government. And finally, it raises two other points. It defines as "incomprehensible the decision to leave some of the proposed repeals in the text of the decree," referring to aspects of the operation of the Sustainable Growth Fund and measures for complex industrial crisis areas, while leaving out all the others. Because in this way 'a legislative vacuum is created that could jeopardise the regular and continuous implementation of relevant measures in the hands of the General Directorate for Incentives to Enterprises pending the definition of the reorganisation'. Then (net, it must be said, of changes in extremis) there is a possible and non-trivial fallout on the NRP, since the reform of incentives is a milestone set for 30 June 2026, while the postponement to the budget law entails an inevitable postponement to the end of the year.