Justice: fines are rising and tax revenue is increasing

There are encouraging signs regarding financial penalties following the implementation of the Cartabia reform. This has been set out in black and white by the Ministry of Justice in its report on the state of enforcement of financial penalties, presented to Parliament – the first report to provide a reasonably reliable assessment of the effectiveness of the new measures.

The reform, which applies to offences committed from 30 December 2022, aims, on the one hand, to increase the use of fines, as part of a comprehensive overhaul of the entire penalty system where imprisonment plays a less central role, and on the other, to replace the traditional civil law model (where the debt arising from a fine was treated as a general debt owed to the Treasury, to be collected via the tax roll, therefore involving the issue of a payment notice by the collection agent) with a different mechanism modelled instead on that of the enforcement of custodial sentences.

Consequently, as a result of the reform, failure to pay the financial penalty, once the deadline specified in the Public Prosecutor’s enforcement order has passed, results in its conversion into a measure restricting personal liberty, which varies depending on whether the failure to pay is voluntary (culpable) or due to insolvency on the part of the convicted person. Conversion is therefore no longer limited to cases of insolvency, and may result in the convicted person being sent to prison, placed under a semi-open regime, or, depending on the circumstances, under house arrest or to community service.

The aim is to restore the effectiveness of a type of criminal penalty which has historically suffered from very high rates of ineffectiveness. Under the old system, in fact, the percentage of financial penalties collected – out of those entrusted to Equitalia Giustizia, net of suspended penalties – for the period 2019–2025 consistently hovered at less than 5 per cent. In 2025, the carry-over from the old system stands at 1.26 per cent, one of the lowest figures in the entire series, despite the volume of cases entrusted remaining essentially stable.

The figures released by the Ministry now make it possible to assess the initial impact of the reform. First and foremost, there has been a significant increase in the number of fines imposed, with data showing that in both 2024 and 2025 the total number of fines (and the corresponding financial amounts) were considerably higher than the number of convictions handed down throughout the whole of 2023: the number of judgements rose from 5,325 to 15,853 and 16,866, whilst the number of decrees rose from 2,804 to 10,481 and 5,834.