(Finance) – For partnerships, a reform is needed that introduces corrective measures aimed at facilitating transparency of information, including accounting, and forms of simplified reporting that can also be useful from the perspective of their financeability. This is the main indication that emerged from the conference “Partnerships: reform prospects for transparency and financeability” organized by National Council of Accountantsheld today in Rome, in which scholars of the subject and the president of the National Council of Notaries, Giulio Biino.
“Although in recent years there has been a decline in newly established simple companies in favor of an increase in joint-stock companies – stated the National councilor of accountants with responsibility for corporate law David Moro -, it is still a phenomenon of some importance, with around 700 thousand active partnerships representing 11% of the total employees employed in Italian companies. The ductility and agility of operation and the lower administrative costs have been characteristic of partnerships since their origins, aspects that must absolutely be appreciated, confirmed and valorised. But time passes and the most recent reforms in a continuously evolving economy like the current one demonstrate that these types of companies and the discipline that regulates them require a modernizing reform intervention that can make them competitive models in the Italian production system”.
“Many of the current provisions on partnerships – added Moro – are difficult to be compatible with recent reforms that have affected businesses in general as, for example, could happen with reference to the provision on organizational structures introduced in 2019 with the Crisis Code Cases in which misalignments with other regulations are recognized are not uncommon, as occurs in the case of the admissibility of simplified accounting, provided for in the tax field, but not in the civil one, with the concrete risk for directors of encountering the crimes of simple bankruptcy. Furthermore, this form of accounting, not including the information required by the EBA directives for bank loans to businesses, concretely risks making small companies and companies unfinanceable”. “The regulation of partnerships – he concluded – presents systematic chasms of a certain impact: from the absence of a regulation for the establishment of constraints on shareholdings to the rules of withdrawal which do not contemplate legal causes; from the rules on the liquidation of the company to those on decisions; from the regulation of judicial liquidation which has changed little since 1942 to the absence of precise rules on heterogeneous transformation. All this demonstrates the need to intervene with a reform that updates the current regulatory system”.
Concepts also shared in his greeting speech by the Vice President of the National Council of the category, Michele de Tavonattiwho announced the category’s willingness to work on an organic reform proposal for which “the discussion and sharing of ideas with various stakeholders such as companies, banks and other professional associations will be important”.
For Giulio Biino, president of the National Council of Notaries“today’s conference answers in the affirmative to the question: do we still need partnerships? If so, there is no doubt that they must be brought up to date with the times. Let us not forget that in the last ten years they have decreased in number to a greater extent than 20%. Reforming them, updating them, refreshing them must then mean maintaining their streamlined nature, but always with the essential respect for legality and related controls, legal certainty and the reliability of public registers”.