Guilty until proven innocent

First, the facts: from today, the Italian Revenue Agency (Agenzia delle Entrate) will have the power (and we are sure it will use it) to access every financial relationship between each Italian taxpayer and their bank during 2013. More precisely, Ruling 18269, issued by the Agency’s Director, requires every financial intermediary operating in Italy to report, by 2 March, all relationships established in 2013; the deadline for reporting 2014 data is instead set for 29 May.

Nothing new under the sun: the more attentive will recall that the decision was first taken in 2007 for monthly reporting and in 2010 for annual reporting. The issue is back because for 2013 and 2014 the Revenue Agency itself had (strangely, you will grant us) ordered the flow of information to be suspended. The recent ruling makes structural what will from now on become standard practice: from 2016, annual data for the previous calendar year must be reported by 15 February. A closer look at the document shows how remarkably detailed the required data are: not only current account balances, but even the number of times a holder has accessed their safe deposit box. And that is not all: the ruling also covers people who are not account holders. Banks will in fact also have to report over-the-counter transactions (such as cash withdrawals at a bank other than one’s own, or purchases of foreign currency), whether they amount to €10 or €10,000. All perfectly normal?

The crux of the matter is how the Revenue Agency will use these data. Decree-Law 201 of December 2011, passed by the Monti government, stated that the information could be used solely to draw up selective audit lists (“used by the Revenue Agency to identify the taxpayers at greatest risk of evasion to be subjected to audit”). With the recent Stability Law approved by the Renzi government we go from the frying pan into the fire, since it authorises a much broader use of the annual data, as set out in Article 1, paragraph 314: “In addition to the purposes provided for by Article 7 […] the information reported […] is used by the Revenue Agency for the analysis of the risk of evasion. The same information, including the average annual balance of bank and postal deposits and current accounts, is also used to simplify citizens’ obligations in completing the single substitute declaration […] as well as when checking the truthfulness of the data declared therein”. The procedures underlying the “analysis of the risk of evasion” have yet to be officially disclosed, but experience leads us to expect a broad interpretation of the concept, and very probably one that infringes on individual liberty.

The stance against these insidious, liberticidal measures must be clear and firm: insidious because the true nature of the act is ever more often disguised behind the evergreen and dangerous argument that “anything goes in the fight against tax evasion”; liberticidal because, through an undeniable pressure exerted by means of systematic monitoring, this watchful state, increasingly built on a “culture of suspicion”, commits a genuine act of violence against the economic choices of the individual and, since economic freedom is a necessary condition and indispensable premise of individual freedom, against the latter as well. Against the right-thinking statists who systematically bow to the taxman, against the cosy drawing rooms of the press (“how can we criticise it? It’s to fight evasion!”), and against the various bodies that supposedly guarantee fundamental democratic freedoms, always ready to quibble over bureaucratic technicalities yet just as reliably, and culpably, silent when a state agency intrudes with impunity into citizens’ private lives, we stand, today as always, #dallapartedeglioppressi.