(Finance) – “There are continuing difficulties cwhich all of us Accountants experience every day in relations with the territorial offices of the Revenue Agency. Staff shortages in the Agency’s staff and blocking of notifications of documents from the Financial Administration, during the pandemic, have generated the perfect storm in the management of practices, creating a funnel that generates discomfort more than two years after the return to normality” : this was said by the president of the accountants, Elbano de Nuccio, during his report to the general states of the category, in Rome.
“Even today – he said – taxpayers, but also us accountants who assist them, encounter significant difficulties in relationships, even the simplest ones, with the Agency’s offices”.
“Despite all possible understanding of the objective difficulties in which the Agency’s offices are forced to operate today – he continued – we must however acknowledge that more must be done to restore a normal situation in relations with the Agency. For this reason I am launching an appeal to politicians to make the resources available to the Agency for the recruitment of the staff necessary for a more efficient management of assistance services towards taxpayers and the professionals who assist them, and to the Director of RevenueErnesto Maria Ruffini, so that, while waiting for the arrival of new staff, the organization of the staff already available can be improved, by remodulating smart working by Agency officials and creating, where possible, preferential lanes for professionals. The accountant who interacts with the Agency does not do so on a personal basis, but in the interest of the taxpaying citizen and to ensure that the necessary resources flow to the State for the maintenance of public accounts”.
For de Nuccio “I believe it is time to intervene on this as soon as possible, because even that 10-13% of practices which, according to the Agency’s official data, do not find timely feedback with Civis must be put in a position to be able to communicate promptly with the Agency offices. If these critical issues are not resolved – he concluded – even the most ambitious and far-sighted of tax reforms, such as the one currently underway, risks being nullified. It would be the most serious mistake, which we cannot afford in this important reform season, so I am sure that also on this important aspect the deputy minister Maurizio Leo will pay all his attention to a tax-taxpayer relationship that is more profitable and balanced not only in the principles and provisions of the law, but also in the facts and on the field”.
During his speech, de Nuccio he wanted to underline the centrality of PMsWhich represent “the backbone not only of our business system, but of the whole of Europe”. “The next European Parliament will have the enormous task of defending and growing the continental economic system in a context that promises to be extremely complex. It is important that significant reflection on the role of SMEs is emerging in the debate on this topic. In this regard, we believe that it would be appropriate to also relaunch at a community level the experience of our districts, which for many years have represented an important and far-sighted successful experience and which, with ad hoc regulatory interventions, have all it takes to be relaunch yourself.”
“The defense of an entrepreneurial fabric made up of small and medium-sized enterprises”, he said, “It also involves rules of accountability, governance and performance monitoringcompanies that take these realities into account right from the European tables on these matters which often start, in their approach, without adequately taking them into account. This defense – he added – must not be uncritical, because the fragmentation of the entrepreneurial fabric not only brings with it the merits of flexibility in the face of increasingly less predictable and increasingly sudden changes in scenarios, but also the weaknesses of those who, net of niches of excellence, must give up from the start being an interlocutor for large markets which prefer to satisfy their demand by finding a limited number of interlocutors with great production capacity in terms of volumes, rather than chasing a myriad of them with limited volumes”.
“We must become interpreters,” he continued, “in Italy and abroad, of a relaunch of the logic of business districts and networks, in an attempt to create a synthesis between a flexibility that must not be lost and a centralization of certain functions that must be found. It is not even necessary to find particularly innovative formulas, because the shared development of certain business functions is nothing other than the specific logic of consortia, but, naming issues aside, it is the task of politics to guide along this path with regulatory instruments capable of having a profound impact and not marginally on organizational choices”.
“It is – concluded de Nuccio – a proposal that aims to defend and strengthen the Italian and continental economic fabric, a terrain on which the role of accountants from all over Europe, which offer both consultancy and business services in outsourcing, could be truly decisive”.