Rai, the alarm on the accounts for Viale Mazzini with the license fee not included in the bill

Who is exempt from payment

You can be exempt from paying the Rai license fee if you do not have a television or equipment capable of receiving the radio and television signal; for those who have reached the age of 75 and have an annual income not exceeding 8 thousand euros. Also exempted are diplomatic agents, consular officials or employees, officials of international organizations or military personnel of non-Italian citizenship or civilian personnel not resident in Italy, of non-Italian citizenship, belonging to the NATO forces stationed in Italy.

The fee income

In 2021, license fee revenues came close to 1.82 billion euros, against 1.72 the year before, with fee revenues for private users of 1.71 billion against 1.64 billion the year before. “From 2013 to 2020 the ordinary fee has also dropped slightly”, Rai CEO Carlo Fuortes always said during that hearing, referring precisely to the issue (and the emergency) accounts for Viale Mazzini. And on that occasion, with regard to the license fee, Fuortes himself spoke, as mentioned, of an “incongruous resource”, underlining that with the introduction of the license fee in the bill, “the number of payers has increased from 15 million to 21-22 million” and “The evasion rate has dropped from 27 percent to 5 percent, and is currently around 3 percent.” The withholdings from the state for “2.4 billion in eight years” acted in the opposite direction, the CEO Rai finally claimed.

How much enters the Rai coffers

However, it is good to remember, as Rai’s top management has repeatedly specified, that, for the annual amount of 90 euros, Viale Mazzini receives only a part of it. In fact, the transfer of the license fee does not take place directly from the bill to Rai, but passes through the Revenue Agency and then from this to the public television coffers. And the 90 euros include the contribution of 110 million euros per year to the Fund for information pluralism and innovation, «established – reads the same Rai budget – in the estimates of the Ministry of Economy and Finance and for the remaining portion to Rai, without prejudice to the sums of the revenue from the license fee already allocated by current legislation to specific purposes”. It must be said that the 5% reduction in the sums to be paid to Rai to cover the cost of providing the Public Service and the so-called “extra revenue” has been repealed since 2021, determined by the higher revenues compared to the provisions of the Budget state forecast for the year 2016. we are talking about eighty million.

From the State a withholding of 270 million

However, as reported a few days ago by Mediobanca’s Research Area, the portion of the ordinary license fee that is collected by Rai is approximately 86% of the amount paid by the user (it was 93% in 2013). In absolute terms it means a deduction of 270 million. Therefore, in 2022, only 77.8 of the 90 euros disbursed by each subscriber were collected by Rai, with an incidence also in this case lower than the European average (90.5%) and below that of the major countries : Germany 98%; UK 97% and France 96%.

The lowest rent among European countries

In this context, the Mediobanca Research Area finally underlines how in this context Italy is entitled to the lowest unit fee among the major European countries, also lower than the European average (25 cents per day per subscriber against the average 32). Much more expensive for taxpayers is German public TV (58 cents a day for a total of 210 euros), the British (50 cents for a total of 183.2 euros) and the French (38 cents for a total of 138 euros).