The fight against tax evasion, the end of the ‘redditometro’: only €400,000 collected from ‘fake poor’ in a year
According to the Court of Auditors, ‘there remains a need to ensure that effective control mechanisms are in place in the event of significant, unjustified increases in assets’
by Lorenzo Pace
Key points
They called it the ‘taxman’s big brother’. For years, the ‘redditometro’ – technically known as the ‘summary income assessment’ – was the tool the Italian Revenue Agency used to knock on the doors of those who declared low incomes but spent lavishly: villas, boats, cars, horses and even caravans – at least when the tool was first introduced to root out Italia’s ‘pretend poor’.
A scaled-back audit method that is deeply unpopular with political forces on both the current government side and within the opposition itself, due to the erosion of public support caused by scrutinising taxpayers’ movable and immovable assets and their lifestyle.
Confirming that the scheme has been definitively shelved are the figures from the 2025 General State Accounts, published by the Court of Auditors, which show with surgical precision just how marginal the summary assessment process has now become: in 2025, this method yielded just €398,457 in collected sums, compared with €35.2 million assessed. The ratio of the amount assessed to the amount collected stands at 1.13 per cent.
How the summary assessment works
The measure stems from Article 38 of Presidential Decree No. 600 of 1973, and has always been the ‘fallback provision’ of the system of tax audits on individuals. The summary assessment, in fact, allows the tax authorities to reconstruct a taxpayer’s actual income based on the expenses they have incurred or on indicators suggesting a higher ability to pay tax than that declared. In essence: if you declare €15,000 a year but own an SUV, a house in the mountains and send your children to a private school, something doesn’t add up for the tax authorities and the risk analysis red flag is immediately raised.
The (ongoing) changes
Over the years, however, the system has been amended so many times that it has, in effect, become almost unusable. The final blow came in August 2024 with the Omnibus Decree, which rewrote the conditions for proceeding. Today, the summary assessment is triggered only if the reconstructed income exceeds the declared income by at least 20 per cent for at least one tax year, and the difference must be at least ten times the annual social allowance – that is, no less than 69,473 euros. Below that threshold, the tax authorities cannot take action. The Court of Auditors speaks in no uncertain terms of a ‘drastic scaling back’ of the measure.
