File-shredding, tug-of-war in the majority. The League presses for the amnesty, Fdi slows down

The two-year agreement did not make the cut, and the pressure is on to find new resources to reduce the 35% Irpef rate, the one that weighs on middle-income taxpayers. The League is pushing for a new 'rottamazione delle cartelle,' with a project to revive the amendment that failed to make it into the Budget Law. Fratelli d'Italia, on the other hand, is holding back, leaving the floor to the economic manager Marco Osnato, according to whom a new 'rottamazione', the fifth version, 'would not be so easy to do'.

Certainly the 'building site' of tax folders is on the move. Deputy Minister for the Economy Maurizio Leo, who is in charge of taxation in the government, takes the opportunity of the arrival of a new development - that of greater instalment payments on tax bills - to announce that a commission has been set up with the task of 'proposing legislative solutions to avoid the accumulation of uncollected tax credits'. The two knots are connected. On the one hand, the mountain of unpaid tax bills - the so-called 'warehouse of the uncollected' - and on the other, the desire to reduce taxes on the middle class.

The latest figures speak of 1.2 trillion uncollected tax bills, but they are updated to the end of 2023. In the course of the year, however, came the delegated decree reforming tax collection and providing for both longer instalment periods for tax bills and automatic cancellation after five years. "As of 1 January 2025, taxpayers will be able to defer their debts registered with the tax authorities up to 84 monthly instalments, exceeding the current limit of 72," Leo announced in the meantime, also talking about the commission that will have to find a way to dispose of the uncollected stock.

The huge stock of unpaid tax bills is the theme that the League is using to relaunch a very simplified 'rottamazione quinquies': 12 annual instalments spread over 10 years in which only the capital can be paid without interest and penalties. Without foreseeing the loss of benefits if one fails to pay an instalment. "We have a tax warehouse amounting to 1,200 billion euro. Warehouse that grows year by year,' said the League's undersecretary for Mimit, Massimo Bitonci. 'We are talking about dead companies, closed businesses, taxpayers who are unable to comply. Money that the tax authorities will never recover. With the scrapping scheme, we are giving those who want to get out of a difficult situation the chance to do so'.

But Fratelli d'Italia puts the brakes on this. 'We are certainly in favour of cutting Irpef for the middle class and also of increasing the number of beneficiaries of the flat tax,' Osnato says. 'Forza Italia and the League have the minister and undersecretaries at the Economy department and not even they, I understand, have yet found a way to identify well how to structure the five-year scrapping. We have no preclusions, but this means that it is clearly not as easy to do as is being said in these hours'.