Pino Corrias: the theft at the square of tax evaders

This article by Pino Corrias is published in the number 37 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until 9 September 2025

We are surrounded by the evaders, the amnesty and the Salvini. Just as we took the sun (and the rain) under the umbrellas that exempted the bathing, the Court of Auditors informed us of the theft about the theft of tax evaders. The theft to the square. Revealing that only 17.7 percent of the discovered evasion is paid by social thieves and collected by the state.
And the rest? He is well hidden from the next amnesty, which said in bureaucratic sounds: “For well -rooted expectations of subsequent scrapping, given the conviction of being able to evade the executive action”. The pull and spring works like this: I don’t pay, they catch me, I admit. Rateizzo in ten installments. I pay the first, then I stop and I make fish in the barrel. Six months pass, one year. A new amnesty arrives. Adnerisco, recessed the discount on the discount. I pay a installment again, then I stop, I wait for the next amnesty. And the pull and gives up again again.

I risk something? Not very much. The checks – says the Court of Auditors – in 2024 were made on 1.4 percent of the 9 million taxpayers not taxed at the source, one every 71. It means that the tax evader has 71 empty boxes where to hide and only one who cares. But also the one without too many consequences, given that there are no additional sanctions for those who are discovered, neither fines nor foreclosures, nor prison, as happens in Europe or America. But only a pat on the shoulders equivalent to the uncomfortable sum. That is, if today I owe 10 thousand euros to the tax authorities, always 10 thousand I will have to pay tomorrow. So why not wait for the day after tomorrow and in the meantime try to get away with it?

The result frightens. The Court calculates that the unpaid folders over the years have reached the stratospheric figure of 1,300 billion, Half of whom already declared unrecoverable, due to deceased people, nullatenenti, dead and buried companies, bankrupt companies: Fisco Bye Bye. And also indignation bye Bye, given that we continue to climb our national shame at the rhythm of 80, 100 billion euros that every year are missing from the appeal. Money that instead of contributing to the expenditure for health, education, transport, care of the territory, end up in the pockets of the tax evaders who (among other things) use all public services serenely without having remotely paid them.

What about fiscal equity? Pay in words, not in votes. For this reason, it only affects sob from the times of the ancient Christian Democrat governments, passing through those of Berlusconi, who judged “morally acceptable” to escape the tax authorities, and to the one crowned by Giorgia Meloni who just in Sicily, regional elections of 2023, defined the “state lace” fees. Not to mention the champion Matteo Salvini and his League, born by setting fire to the tax folders of “Rome thief”. It is still he who asks this electoral hunt for a new amnesty, the fifteenth in three years, even if the proceeds have gradually gradually been, all waiting for the Cuccagna tree to put a new branch. To which (carefully) hang ourselves.

Pino Corrias

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