Unpaid taxes, how the IRS will flush out tax evaders with electronic invoice data

The IRS is aiming to play fast and loose with taxpayers who do not settle their tax bills. The impetus to improve the accuracy rate of third-party garnishments comes from the latest manoeuvre, which makes available to the public collection agent the 2.5 billion electronic invoices in the Revenue Agency's databases. A procedure that will have to be engineered by a provision of the Agency's director Vincenzo Carbone and on which, after the priority linked to the fine-tuning of the new models for adhering to the five-year scrapping scheme, work is already underway to define all the steps. And this even though the Budget Law grants 90 days of time, that is, until the end of March.

The objective is clear: to target the trade receivables of debtors in arrears with collection. This is what electronic invoice data are for: to know how many payments the taxpayer in debt with the tax authorities is waiting to collect, so as to intercept and block them in advance. This is the real step forward that the financial administration will be able to take with the possibility of having a very large and capillary database such as that of the electronic invoice. An asset composed of 55% transactions between economic activities (B2B), 44% towards final consumers (B2C) and only 1% towards public administration structures (B2G).

But how will the mechanism work? The Inland Revenue Agency will make available to the Collection Agency the data of the sum of the invoice payments issued in the previous six months by debtors on the tax rolls (including debtors of sums deriving from enforceable assessments or charging notices entrusted for collection to the Collection Agency), but also by their co-obligors towards the same purchaser or principal. In practice, an extension of the current perimeter of the usability of electronic invoice data for anti-avoidance purposes, which until now has only been allowed to the Guardia di Finanza in the performance of economic police functions, to the Revenue Agency and also to the Yellow Flames for risk analysis and control activities for tax purposes, and to the Customs and Monopolies Agency for border surveillance and control activities and the protection of Italian products. But for the collection will arrive - through the 'mediation' of the Revenue - a six-monthly information package. However, there will be no 'trawling'. The information acquired, in fact, will have to be processed and used in a surgical way to hit evasion resulting from non-payment of debts entered on the tax rolls and especially taxpayers with a high risk of fraud.

An input to use the third-party garnishment a little more safely. The latest available figures speak of 600,000 foreclosures in 2024 leading to total collections of 1.3 billion. Yet looking at the manoeuvre's technical report, only 22.3 per cent (a little less than a quarter) of the procedures carried out were effective, leading to an average recovery value of EUR 10,500. It is no coincidence that the technical report assumes that with the new system a leverage effect can be achieved by raising the effectiveness index to 44.6%, i.e. exactly double. The estimate is conservatively constructed, assuming that this performance recovery can be achieved on 10 per cent of the foreclosures executed. This should allow, starting in 2027 in light of the running-in time of the new mechanism, an improvement in the impact of collection from roles of 140 million euros per year (80 million for state taxes such as, for example, Irpef or Ires, 40 million for social security contributions, and the remaining 20 million for credits of other entities entrusted to the collection). For all this to happen, the risk analysis that can be developed through the new information assets that will be made available to the Collection Agency becomes central, because it will have to be able to identify where the greatest likelihood of successful recovery is in the presence of commercial debts claimed by the collection debtor.

A measure that had also been advocated in the report of the ministerial commission for the analysis of the disposal of the collection's monstrous warehouse, which had highlighted, among other things, the need to make available to the public concessionaire "the electronic invoicing data to initiate targeted procedures for the seizure of receivables from commercial relations entertained by the debtor with third parties". An advice that, unlike what happened with the data of the Current Accounts Super Registry (politically much less digestible by the majority electorate), the legislator decided to take into consideration.