More than 20.2 billion euro was brought back into State coffers last year thanks to the overall tax evasion activities conducted by the Revenue Agency together with Revenue Collection Agency. Of these, 19 billion came from ordinary controls, a record result, exceeding the 16.8 billion recovered in 2019 by 2.2 billion (+13%). In addition to the 'higher revenue' from tax enforcement activities, the Revenue Agency ensured 'lower losses' from State budget thanks to risk analyses and anti-fraud activities, for a total of EUR 9.5 billion between tax credits, bonuses and fiscal refunds blocked in various fields of investigation. Spontaneous revenue is also growing. In fact, direct and indirect taxes paid autonomously by taxpayers amount to almost EUR 510 billion (+11% on 2021), while refunds paid out in 2022 to households and businesses are close to EUR 20 billion. These are some of the most significant figures presented today at the press conference by the Head of the Revenue Agency and Revenue Collection Agency, Ernesto Maria Ruffini, on the results achieved in 2022 and the future prospects of both Agencies. The Minister of Economy and Finance, Giancarlo Giorgetti, and the Deputy Minister of Economy and Finance, Maurizio Leo, also attended the event.
Grow both revenue recovered thanks to tax enforcement controls and compliance receipts – As already said, of the 20.2 billion returned to State's coffers last year, 19 billion are the result of ordinary recovery from control activities. Particularly, 10.9 billion from direct payments, 3.2 billion from compliance letters, and 4.9 billion from payment notices by Revenue Collection Agency. On the other side, collections from extraordinary measures, like “fiscal peace” and “tax debts write off”, amounted to 1.2 billion.
The rise of advance fiscal notice or also known as tax alerts - Again with reference to the recovery achieved by the Revenue Agency, collections through tax compliance strategy in 2022 registered a 52% increase compared to 2019, when the sums aroused from to tax 'alerts' stopped at 2.1 billion. In details, from January to December 2022, more than 2.5 million advance fiscal notices were sent to alert taxpayers to possible anomalies, significantly exceeding the target set by the National Recovery and Resilience Plan, NRRP, either with regard to the number of preventive communications sent (102% of the target) or with regard to collection (120% of the target). As far as anti-fraud activity is concerned, in 2022 a total of EUR 9.5 billion in undue amounts were intercepted, of which more than EUR 6.3 billion related to false credits from blocked building bonuses and more than EUR 2.1 billion related to fictitious credits discarded thanks to the prior checking of transfer notices.
A look at what has been done for families and businesses – Not only recovery activities, but also an extraordinary effort to provide families and businesses with the tax refunds they are entitled to, and making so more quickly. Last year, 3.4 million fiscal repayments were made for almost EUR 20 billion of which EUR 17 billion to businesses. Thanks to recent simplifications put in place by the Agency, the time needed to credit the sums due to taxpayers has been reduced by about 30 days. If we add the tax refunds for the three-year period 2020-2022 (58.8Bn) to the sums 'credited' as non-refundable grants in the same period, amounting to 25.3Bn, the liquidity injected by the Revenue to support the economy during the Covid period exceeds 84Bn.
Stefano Latini