Manoeuvre, from bitcoins to sugar tax, from healthcare to pensions, the race is on for corrections in Parliament

With the approval of the budget bill in the Chamber of Deputies, the budget session officially gets underway and for the first time in the last decade, the Chamber of Deputies will have a full 70 days to examine it. A longer time that does not, however, correspond to more room for intervention, given that the new Brussels rules on the pact do not allow for intervention unless coverage is provided by new tax increases. Then there is the fact that the deposited bill only allocates 120 million for the parliamentary adjustments, which, according to the first warm statements, will not be few in any case, at least in terms of requests. The hope of increasing the endowment is pinned on the success of the tax concordat, which expires on 31 October 2025, the results of which will be accounted for, as usual, no earlier than 10 days next November. Until that date there will be a succession of announcements and amendments. There are those who are already calling for the cancellation of the bitcoin and company car stingers, as well as for not killing start-ups with the extension of the digital service tax, the Italian-style web tax, to SMEs. The TV licence fee, which returns to €90 after being reduced to €70 by 2024, accompanied by the slimming-down treatment on personnel costs imposed on RAI in three years, or the salaries of doctors and nurses, the postponement of the sugar tax, minimum pensions, and the flexibility in leaving that is dear to the League. A confrontation that will see the government committed, as it is every year, to defending the tightness of the public accounts from the deluge of corrective measures that, by now, increasingly arrive from the majority that supports the executive.

It is not only the government that is hoping for a success of the concordat. Turning the lights on the pact between the IRS and 4.7 million VAT numbers are all the political parties hoping for a billion-dollar collection so that they can recover resources to be used to correct the budget manoeuvre. But beware, at the moment, the declarations of intent to use the revenue from the concordat seem to disregard the fact that the 'advance' decree connected to the same budget manoeuvre and presented to the Senate, actually armour the revenue from concordat by allocating it to the fund for the reduction of tax pressure. Using those resources, in order to support the amendments to the manoeuvre, would mean at the same time no longer wanting to cut taxes for the middle class by, for example, reducing the tax rate from 35 to 33% for those who declare incomes between 28 thousand and 50 thousand, as the party of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is asking, or even more so by moving the second Irpef bracket from 50 thousand to 60 thousand, a project that has been repeatedly announced by the Forza Italia Azzurri. Difficult choice between having to announce that they can no longer cut taxes to taxpayers because the fund for this has been emptied by amendments to the budget law.

The tax on bitcoin, which rises in one fell swoop by 61% from 26% to 42% on accrued income, immediately met with a rejection from the League, which even before it was defined and quantified, demanded its cancellation or at least a downward revision. In terms of revenue, the increase from 26% to 42% in the taxation of capital gains and income generated by transactions in bitcoins and other crypto-assets will, in the end, bring little more than EUR 16.7 million in addition to the EUR 27 million collected to date.

Fieg and then the Consortium of Digital Commerce immediately took action, according to which Italy's attractiveness and the competitive capacity of SMEs are at risk. For the publishers' federation, removing the current thresholds that exclude companies with less than 750 million in global turnover and revenues from digital services in Italy of less than 5.5 million from the 3% tax on revenues would be tantamount to hitting all Italian digital companies. An enlargement of the scope of the digital service tax is estimated to increase annual revenues by €51.6 million. No less alarmed is the Digital Commerce Consortium, according to which the extension of the Web Tax could trigger a cascading effect along the digital value chain. Taxing gross revenues, says Netcomm in a note, rather than profits has direct impacts on the entire digital ecosystem. Companies that provide digital services, such as online advertising, e-commerce platform management or data hosting, will increase their prices to compensate for the new tax burden. This increase will also have indirect effects on companies that are not digital in nature, but use these services, increasing the overall cost of digital operations.

Under the lens of the majority and opposition forces, the incoming sting on cars granted to employees for mixed use also ended up immediately. The change in the rules for calculating the fringe benefit, in fact, penalises with cost increases of over 60% (see Il Sole 24 ore of 26 October 2024, section Norme e Tributi) the allocation of company vehicles powered by a combustion engine, i.e. those running on petrol, diesel and hybrids in the range between 61 and 160 g/km of Co2. The government's clampdown, however, turns into a mockery for those workers who have already selected the vehicle of their liking, also on account of the tax cost to be borne, but who will only be assigned the car in 2025 because of longer delivery times linked to the procurement of components or the chip crisis, and for this they will have to bear a much higher payroll levy. A solution to this problem could be to postpone the entry into force of the new fringe benefit calculation rules to the second half of the year. Unless one wants to consider those contracts as concluded and not the order made by the company to the hirer by having these mixed-use contracts signed between company and employee by the end of 2024. The latter solution, which, on closer inspection, would not affect the balances of the Budget Law, since these contracts would not be counted in the determination of the quantification of the measure's higher revenue expected by the Government.