Tax amnesties: a flop in terms of revenue. Seizures are on the rise

According to the proponents’ intentions – at least the official ones – these amnesties were supposed to increase the tax authorities’ collection capacity and reduce the backlog of unpaid taxes. However, these two objectives – repeatedly emphasised in statements by governments of all political persuasions that have approved the numerous tax amnesties over the last ten years – have not been achieved. This is because the rate of tax collection has not increased, whilst the backlog has swelled to 1,331 billion, as recorded in the latest official census. An unexpected side effect is now, however, taking shape: a surge in seizures and enforcement actions, fuelled in part by the many individuals who failed to comply with the tax amnesties and have ended up on the ‘blacklists’ of debtors whom the tax authorities are now targeting with a firm hand.

The trend in tax revenue figures, as highlighted by the Court of Auditors in its latest Report on the General State Accounts for 2025, illustrates the phenomenon quite effectively. The first four debt amnesty schemes identified debts to be settled by the end of last year totalling 93.1 billion euros: yet only 38.1 billion, or 41 per cent, actually reached the state coffers. The remaining 59 per cent fell by the wayside. The report may be partly influenced by the phenomenon of multiple applications by taxpayers who re-applied for the next amnesty scheme after being excluded from the previous one for failing to meet the payment schedule. But it is precisely this phenomenon of repeat participants in debt write-off schemes that highlights one of the main flaws of the scheme: it is used to buy time – halting repossessions and enforcement proceedings through enrolment – rather than to honour one’s debts.

In the tax authorities’ game, however, the can that’s been kicked down the line comes back to haunt you. Because anyone who loses their eligibility for a favourable settlement scheme for failing to pay their instalments on time is thrown back into the cauldron of ordinary tax collection, and does so wearing a black jersey that places them in the groups (‘clusters’, as the agency calls them) of ‘targeted campaigns’. In these, heavy-handed tactics are the order of the day.
This is also where the surge in repossessions stems from, which has been at the centre of a sharp rise in recent years. In 2025, there were 772,653 such cases – 25.2 per cent more than in 2024 and triple the figure of nearly 265,000 recorded in 2022.
In short, delaying tactics cannot go on indefinitely. Because at some point, the tax authorities show their teeth again. Even so, often even heavy-handed measures do not seem sufficient to overcome taxpayers’ resistance.
According to the Court of Auditors’ calculations, enforcement actions against registered movable assets are successful in 47.2 per cent of cases. Whereas when – though this is rare – the subject of the attachment is a property, only 3.8 per cent of proceedings are successful. In the case of third-party attachment, the success rate stands at 22.1 per cent; and it is precisely for this reason that the latest budget measures have enabled the Revenue Agency to send electronic invoice data to its sister agency responsible for debt collection: in this way, in fact, a warning is triggered for payments made to those with outstanding debts to the tax authorities, which then collects the sums in their place.

Closing the final link in the chain is crucial to translating the significant acceleration in tax audits by the tax authorities into tangible results. Even so, the battle against debtors’ reluctance to pay is a titanic struggle. Over the last 25 years, tax demands have succeeded in bringing €217.8 billion into the coffers of the State, INPS, INAIL and local authorities – that is, 14.7% of the 1,477 billion entered on the tax roll during the same period. The remaining 85.3%, therefore, remains uncollected for the time being: and is highly likely to remain so.

Well over 70 per cent of the debts incurred in the very early 2000s remain outstanding.And when we look at more recent periods, the recovery rate falls to around 10% for 2020–2022, before dropping to 2.19% of the cases referred for collection during 2025.