Tcf and aggregated studies: cross-fertilisation of tax practitioners' work
Certification of fiscal risk requires new skills The merger neutrality rule favours the development of Stp
by Dario Aquaro
The tax control framework (Tcf) to broaden the professional field, with new roles and skills. Facilitated aggregations to develop the firm's activity, bringing together more skills. Tax lawyers thus see in the tax reform a double lever: one internal and one external, we might say. While they also look favourably on the progress envisaged in the 'classic' area of adversarial proceedings, with the new figure of the professional tax magistrate who will gradually replace the honorary judges.
Let's start with the Tcf. The entry threshold for cooperative compliance, for companies, has been lowered this year to €500 million in revenues, in order to extend the benefits to medium-large companies. In the meantime, the first specialised training courses that the Cnf (Consiglio nazionale forense) has delegated to the Foundation of the Scuola superiore dell'Avvocatura (Higher School of Lawyers), to forge the certifiers of the tax control framework, have arrived.
'We are witnessing a cultural change,' says Gianni Di Matteo, president of Uncat (Unione nazionale delle Camere degli avvocati tributaristi). "In order to be able to certify companies' tax risk management and control system," he explains, "it is necessary to acquire additional skills, alongside the purely tax ones: skills that concern, for example, accounting principles, international taxation, and extraordinary transactions. By dedicating themselves to this new function, lawyers will move outside the courtroom, their natural stage. With a role of great responsibility, different from the supervisory role proper to auditors'.
The hope is that the role of certifier 'can be carried out by several professionals in a team, precisely because of the need for interdisciplinarity,' continues Di Matteo. 'In this sense, an aid to the structuring of firms may come from the rule on the fiscal neutrality of aggregations. The rule made its debut at the end of 2024 and has prompted the birth of new companies between professionals: in one year, for example, law firm companies have increased by 11.5 per cent, according to InfoCamere's elaborations on data from the Companies Register (see Il Sole 24 Ore of 26 January).
'Faced with articulated, branched corporate structures, with even international relationships, which carry out complex operations, having a team with integrated skills offers more opportunities for the purposes of Tcf certification,' observes Gaetano Ragucci, president of Anti (Associazione nazionale tributaristi italiani). It is true that there is also the chance of the optional regime, aimed at smaller companies, 'but it is a lateral aspect, which has less appeal. In the new tax-taxpayer relationship envisaged by the reform,' he continues, 'collaborative compliance is designed above all for companies with an advanced internal organisation. And in order to cope with the certification task required, it is first of all useful to network: a privileged collaboration between professionals, which allows them to adapt to market needs'. In this direction, also according to Ragucci, 'the rules on facilitated aggregations, which encourage the restructuring of firms and the development of companies between professionals, can also help'.
