The tax litigation in 2019 it reached an overall value of almost 41 billion euros. This data is enough to understand the economic implications for the whole system-country, of the tax justice reform that the government Draghi must submit to Parliament by September. It is one of the measures included in the National Recovery and Resilience Plan. The aim is to improve the quality of the judicial protection of taxpayers – companies and individuals – involved in the administrative action of assessment e collection. The proper functioning of tax justice also has significant social implications: a judicial control of the tax levy carried out according to the efficiency ed effectiveness it guarantees not only the interests of individual taxpayers who require protection for themselves, but also those of the Treasury and of the whole community.
Monstre backlog and conflicts of interest – Backlog and excessive duration of the tax process appear before the Court of Cassation: last March, dictating the programmatic lines on justice, the minister Marta Cartabia found that from a quantitative point of view almost the half of the slopes in the Supreme Court is made up of appeals in tax matters, in terms of time the storage times of appeals in the legitimacy are over 3 years and under the profile qualitative about half of the appeals in tax matters come accepted. This last datum is considered as the manifestation of quality as a whole inadequate of the judgments pronounced in the degrees of merit by the Tax Commissions.
The numerous pathologies that afflict the tax justice are concentrated in its judicial system. The most macroscopic is the role of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, on which both the organization of judges and secretarial staff, and the management of offices and technical and economic resources: the compromise of the constitutional principles of impartiality e third party of the judge (art. 111 of the Constitution) when a justice system comes administered by one of the parties which are opposed in court.
Another critical issue is the choice to entrust the Tax Commissions to “part-time” honorary judges, selected through a competition based only on qualifications and paid by the piecework to an almost negligible extent. There is also an obvious conflict of interest when the tax judges of merit also assume the function of judges at the Tax Section of the Court of Cassation.
An inter-ministerial commission, two reform proposals – On 30 June 2021, the report containing the proposals for the reform of the tax justice prepared by the Interministerial Commission chaired by Professor Cananea Hyacinth. Among the components, one was created fracture of positions. I technicians – scholars and professionals – they spoke almost unanimously in favor of a decision strengthening of special jurisdiction tax through structural changes to its judicial system through a radical reorganization the tax judiciary, the administrative structure in support of it and its body of self-government. The judges have instead openly opposed the reformist proposals, not only manifesting a conservative orientation of the status quo, but also emphasizing the top-down attraction of the tax judgment towards the degree of legitimacy.
Why is there a faction opposed to the reform? – During the summer months, the debate between tax justice operators and numerous ones took place criticisms they were expressed with respect to the proposal formulated by the component of the pretoria matrix, considered by most to be an expression of an attachment to anachronistic corporatist advantages. At the point of law, the conservative front justifies itself by invoking the constitutional prohibition to establish new special judges (Article 102 of the Constitution), but forgets that, according to the jurisprudence of Constitutional Court, “The ordinary Legislator retains the normal power to suppress or to transform, to reorganize the special judges […] o di restructure them again also in the functioning and in the procedure, with the double limit of not distorting […] the matters attributed to their respective competence and to ensure compliance with the Constitution “(so verbatim in ordinance no. 144 of 1998).
The petition on Change.org – In recent weeks, the numerous conferences and hearings at the parliamentary commissions to which the professional associations specialized in the tax field have contributed, have been accompanied by a petition on Change.org to sensitize public opinion and political decision makers to the need for a structural reform of tax justice, which is considered not to be further postponed by the majority of operators in the tax sector. Moreover, the reform is among those at the top of the list of requests made by Carlo Bonomi during the annual meeting of Confindustria: “Give us a tax justice entrusted to judges specialized in the matter, right from the competition notices, enough with the system of amateur judges who make differ the rulings at a territorial level on the same cases “.
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