Ruffini relaunches the fight against tax evasion: “The road is digitization”

Ernesto Maria Ruffini relaunch the fight against tax evasion. The watchwords are: simplicity and transparency. His reappointment as director of the Revenue Agency goes against the more sovereign rhetoric of the current government. Especially those who are suspicious of technologies. Why Ruffini, in an interview with Press, summarizes his line with a metaphor: “A real country is one in which arsonists do not start fires, it is not measured only by the intervention times of the firefighters”. And so it is clear that “the real challenge is to prevent evasion by inducing citizens to pay taxes spontaneously”. To do this, the road, the privileged one, to take “is digitizationwhich leaves a trace and makes it more difficult to escape”.

Although the trend is positive – from 2011 to 2019, evasion of major taxes fell by 15 percent -, the amount of unpaid taxes reaches 74 billion, which remains a lot. The solution therefore, beyond the excerpt of the old folders, which helps to lighten the work of the tax administrations, is structural. “We need to give stability to the tax-taxpayer relationship”, argues Ruffini, “Parliament has an entire legislature ahead of it to implement the tax reform. And it will be necessary to act on the causes rather than on the effects”.

In 23 years, since 2000, Italy has accumulated more than 1,000 billion in unpaid taxes, this is “two thirds of the country’s GDP”. Against this background, the fields of intervention are many and intersect with each other: collection, diversifying it on the basis of the type of tax; the confused tangle of rules that needs to be simplified, and the too high number of types of taxes: “Some micro-taxes are so unprofitable that they could be abolished without creating any problems. Others would necessarily have to be simplified.” Once again: less is more.