Manoeuvre: corrigendum to the text, error on IRES corrected. Towards the Chamber's green light
Despite the approval of almost 400 amendments and more than 100 redrafted corrections, no critical financial issues emerged
by Marco Mobili
3' min read
3' min read
No referral back to committee for the budget bill. Against the Cassandras of the majority itself and the certainties of the opposition the Budget Bill 2027-2025 is ready for a vote of confidence. Once the panettone of Christmas dinners has been disposed of, the senators will give the final go-ahead late Friday evening and close the 2024 budget session definitively on New Year's Eve. This is no small success for all the Ragioneria and Mef technicians, who have worked on more than 600 amendments (they were only supposed to have worked on 300 as super-reported) and in the end have brought almost 400 of them to approval if one also considers the identical corrections.
Process of the measure
.It was the majority itself that first shouted for a return to committee and accused the Chamber offices, the MEF and the Ragioneria for the convulsive and, to say the least, chaotic examination of the 5th Budget session in Montecitorio, and moreover with the president of the Fratelli d'Italia deputies during Wednesday morning's group leader meeting, which, after two long non-stop nights at the beginning of the week for deputies, technicians, lobbyists and journalists, set the timetable for the closure of the Chamber's work on the manoeuvre.
After another night spent putting back in line the 908 paragraphs into which the 124 articles of the budget bill transmitted to Parliament by the government on 23 October last, the surprise for the majority, the opposition and various Cassandras is that the text, after another night spent in the offices of Via XX Settembre doing the financial checks, does not have any financial profiles that would require a new intervention by the Budget Committee and therefore a new postponement of the work to the upcoming pre-Christmas weekend. The race for presents is also safe for the honourable members, the offices and the editorial offices.
Problems in the same majority
Giving an idea of the chaos in which the technicians of the Chamber of Deputies, Mef and Ragioneria had to work are the numbers of the amendment proposals that rained down on the tables of those who had to prepare an opinion and justify both positive and negative results of the corrective proposals. Numbers that testify how the appeal of the Prime Minister herself and Minister Giorgetti at the start of the budget session, namely to keep the amendment proposals by the majority parties to a minimum, fell completely on deaf ears. In the end it was the majority that opposed its own government. As many as 211 amendments were passed, a record in recent legislatures, since this figure rises to almost 400 if identical amendments are taken into account. There have certainly been errors in the management of the mountain of paper produced with duplicate dossiers with the same number but amendments that intervened on the same subject but with two different texts (the Mef's auditors, for example), but the fact remains that the same majority has produced a flurry of correctives, forcing the offices to reformulate and in fact to re-examine each time the financial profiles of as many as 100 proposed amendments. According to Sole 24 Ore's calculations, out of 208 approved amendments as many as 150 bear the signatures of deputies from the four parties supporting Giorgia Meloni.
Correction to text, fixed error on IRES
An errata corrige was submitted to the text of the budget law in the Chamber of Deputies to make three corrections. One in particular concerns the bonus IRES: in fact, an amendment approved in the Budget Committee was missing from the text A presented in the Chamber of Deputies, which adds another condition for the bonus IRES for companies that invest profits in the company. The errata corrige therefore corrects the oversight and reintroduces the condition on the amount of earmarked profits, which must also be no less than '24 per cent of the profits of the financial year in progress on 31 December 2023'. The other two corrections concern the coverage of a rule on justice to speed up the disposal of claims for equitable reparation, which was in fact financed twice: the coverage of EUR 2.5 million for each of the years 2025 and 2026, initially included in the rule, becomes a separate paragraph; while another paragraph, 820, which indicated another coverage for the same rule, of EUR 2.8 million for 2026 and EUR 300,000 per year from 2027, is deleted.
