Severità e indulgenza nella lotta all'evasione della TARSU

There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that local taxes evasion is a problem for Italian municipalities. The increasing need of financial resources explains why in recent times local management has fought this drawback in order to get back fiscal revenues. The evasion of waste disposal tax is a crime and taxpayers should be audited and punished when they are found out breaking the rules. Sometimes, however, this principle suffers from some important limitations. Even when local tax authorities fight tax evasion, evaders who would like to change their behaviour might be prevented from doing so by a kind of lock-in effect, specific of this particular tax, and they might thus keep on evading. For the same reason it is difficult to force the ghosts to show up. Efforts to curb evasion might produce positive external effects between municipalities, as long as taxpayers who move to a new one still refer to the enforcement parameters to which they were used in the former. The recent amnesty as a one-and-only opportunity to pay back local taxes has not been often adopted by local authorities. In fact this measure cannot replace local taxes enforcement because a forgiving local administration should anyway commit itself to check the data included in the amnesty report. The risk of bearing the cost of appeal when a more intensive control occurs is nevertheless a good point to acknowledge that being tolerant towards evaders can ease the burden of the administrative action.

Francesco Pocchettini, Severità e indulgenza nella lotta all'evasione della TARSU in "ECONOMIA PUBBLICA " 3/2005, pp , DOI: