Superbonus, tax audits now target companies

The Revenue's checks on the superbonus are also targeting companies and that organisational scheme defined, on a commercial level, as general contractor. After the checks on condominiums and the operation of compliance letters on cadastral rents, a new strand of disputes related to the maxi facilitation is taking shape in recent weeks. Under scrutiny are the amounts received by the lead contractors of the works when they did not directly carry out the contract works and services, in whole or in part. The difference between what has been paid to third parties (companies or professionals) involved in the construction sites and what has been invoiced to the principals is subject to control, because it would not be eligible for tax relief and could not become a credit to be settled through invoice discount.

These checks, for now, mainly concern certain territories: Veneto, Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna. But the danger, for businesses, is that they will spread to the whole of Italia, with potentially devastating effects; it is enough to think that most of the operations carried out in apartment buildings followed this scheme and that for this type of property 81.5 billion in subsidies had accrued as of 31 December. Only a small part of these - it must be clearly emphasised - could be disputed. The figures, however, are still potentially important, since the Inland Revenue qualifies these dubious credits as non-existent, thus also accruing a very worrying criminal aspect. Above the threshold of 50 thousand euro for the offence of undue compensation, the penalty ranges from a minimum of one year and six months to a maximum of six years.

The objections, for all these reasons, were immediately put under scrutiny by Ance; the builders' association, in fact, points out how this strand of recoveries is based on erroneous legal and interpretative assumptions, also looking at what the tax authorities themselves have already said, over the years, about this type of operation. This is also why interlocutions have already begun with the top management of the financial administration. Hence the intention to carefully verify individual cases, in order to understand what actually emerges from the disputes.

Returning to the origin of the problem, the so-called general contractor scheme (an expression improperly borrowed from public procurement) was often used for the superbonus, essentially for reasons of public utility, especially in more complex contracts such as condominiums. Both the client condominium and the banks financing the credit operations had the convenience of dealing with a single interlocutor, rather than pulverising efforts among dozens of entities, including companies and professionals. Also because in the hottest period of the superbonus it was vital, in order to obtain the tax rebates, to speed up processing times as much as possible and not to get tangled up in red tape, in order to meet the deadlines for the relief.

The companies that, for market and somewhat public service reasons, have proposed this type of commercial offer, are now under scrutiny and, in some regions, are ending up under the lens of the Agency's audits. The problematic elements, highlighted by the Revenue, are essentially two, which in some cases mix and add up. On the one hand, the margins linked to subcontracting are contested. In practice, if a company has subcontracted work paying 90, but then invoiced 100 to the client, that difference of ten would not be tax-advantaged according to the Agency, as it is linked for the tax authorities to a mere coordination activity; for the companies of Ance, however, it is a legitimate business profit, absolutely tax-advantaged and deductible in the invoice.