Owning up to a missed VAT return costs €1,732.50 more than being caught

A consultant in Italy’s ordinary regime bills €120,000 plus VAT across 2026, buys €30,000 plus VAT, and pays the first three quarters of the tax on time. Then the fourth quarter goes unpaid and the annual VAT return is never filed. The tax left behind is €4,950.00.1113

File that return late and the sanction is €3,712.50. Wait instead for the Agenzia delle entrate to work the year out from the invoices, and pay what it asks inside sixty days, and the sanction is €1,980.00. Putting it right yourself costs €1,732.50 more than being caught.31

The return the Agenzia writes for you

On 28 August 2026 the Agenzia published the operating rules for article 54-bis.1 of the VAT act, an article the 2026 budget law added at the end of last year. It lets the office liquidate the VAT of a year whose annual return never arrived, “anche avvalendosi di procedure automatizzate”, from four sources it already holds: the electronic invoices the taxpayer issued and received, the telematic receipts transmitted, the periodic-liquidation communications filed, and the payments made. No inspection is needed, because the office already holds everything the computation uses. The result arrives by certified email, with an itemised list of the invoices it was built from, and a copy in the taxpayer’s online file.12

A return filed without the sections needed to work the tax out counts as omitted too, so the procedure reaches an empty form as well as a missing one. What it does not reach is the flat-rate regime: a forfettario is exonerated from the VAT act’s obligations altogether, the annual return among them, so there is no return of theirs to omit. It reaches everyone else with a partita IVA — which includes anyone who has crossed the flat tax’s revenue ceiling, or was never eligible for it.1127

Two prices for one omission

The same missing return can be settled two ways, and the law charges differently for each. Filing it yourself, more than ninety days late but before the office has started anything, falls under comma 1-bis of the sanctions decree: the penalty for a late payment — twenty-five per cent — “aumentata al triplo”, so seventy-five per cent of the tax. Waiting for the liquidation falls under comma 1, at a hundred and twenty per cent, which article 54-bis.1 then cuts “a un terzo” — forty per cent — if the money is paid inside the sixty days the letter allows.341

The obvious objection is that voluntary correction has its own discount, and here it does not. Comma 2-ter of the ravvedimento article is categorical: the reduction is “in ogni caso, esclusa nel caso di presentazione della dichiarazione con un ritardo superiore a novanta giorni”. Past ninety days the seventy-five per cent is the price, not the starting point for one.5

The gap does not depend on how big the bill is. Both figures are flat rates on one base, so across every level from €500 to €50,000 of tax the difference is thirty-five points of it — €175.00 on the smallest, €17,500.00 on the largest.13

Ten years of interest, and seven to charge it in

Interest is the first thing that ought to erase the discount, since the liquidation can arrive years after the return was due. The provvedimento states its rates: four per cent a year on sums sent to collection, three and a half where the taxpayer pays inside the sixty days. Thirty-five points of tax is exactly ten years of the second and eight and three quarter years of the first, whatever the amount — the tax cancels out of the division.213

The law does not allow ten years. The 2026 return is due between 1 February and 30 April 2027, and article 57 of the VAT act — the deadline article 54-bis.1 points at — runs to 31 December of the seventh year after that: 31 December 2034. Seven years and eight months at the outside, counting interest from the earliest day it could start. It is not long enough to close a gap worth ten.671

What the liquidation refuses to count

The forty per cent is charged on a number the taxpayer would not arrive at themselves. Article 54-bis.1 says that in performing the liquidation “non si tiene conto del credito risultante dalla dichiarazione presentata per il periodo di riferimento antecedente” and that from the tax due “sono scomputati solo i versamenti effettuati”. Last year’s VAT credit does not exist for this purpose, and only cash counts as having been paid.1

The sanctions article describes its own base the other way round. To determine the tax due, it says, three things are computed in reduction: every payment made for the period, the deductible tax from liquidations regularly performed, and “il credito dell’anno precedente del quale non è stato chiesto il rimborso” — the previous year’s credit, so long as no refund of it was claimed. Article 54-bis.1 settles which base governs the letter: its sanction is “determinata in base all’imposta liquidata”. So the rate is the sanctions article’s and the base is the liquidation’s.31

For the same practice with €19,800.00 of VAT for 2026, settled in full, the two bases pull apart in proportion to how much of the year went out as credit rather than cash. Settle €12,000.00 of it with the credit, pay €7,800.00 in cash, and the liquidation finds tax of exactly the amount the credit covered and asks €16,800.00 inside the sixty days. Filing the missing return instead leaves no tax due at all, and comma 1-bis charges the minimum the article carries: €250.00.1314

The neighbouring article is the contrast. Where a return was filed, the ordinary automated control corrects “gli errori materiali commessi dai contribuenti nel riporto delle eccedenze di imposta risultanti dalle precedenti dichiarazioni” — it works with last year’s credit and fixes mistakes in carrying it forward. One article later, for the year that was not declared, the same credit is not counted at all.8

Sixty days, in cash

The forty per cent buys less than it looks like, and the payment terms are why. The letter cannot be settled by offsetting anything against it: article 54-bis.1 excludes the ordinary F24 compensazione for paying it, and excludes it again for the sums once they are sent to collection. A taxpayer holding the very VAT credit the liquidation refused to count cannot use it to pay.110

Nor can it be spread. The Agenzia’s ordinary automated-control letters can be paid in up to twenty quarterly instalments, five years of them. The provvedimento states that this rateazione is not available here. The whole amount has to leave the bank account inside sixty days, and if it does not, the sums go straight onto the rolls “a titolo definitivo” at the full hundred and twenty per cent, which turns the consultant’s €6,930.00 into €10,890.00.921

Receiving the letter also shuts the cheaper door behind it. Comma 4 of article 54-bis.1 says the communication of the results “non consente di applicare l’articolo 5, comma 1-bis”: the seventy-five per cent route is gone once the envelope arrives, whatever the taxpayer does next. And none of it is the end of the matter — the whole procedure runs “senza pregiudizio dell’azione accertatrice”, so a full assessment can still follow.1

What this does not settle

Three things. The comparison is of sanctions, because the sanction is the only thing either provision fixes: the tax is owed on both routes, and interest runs on both, at rates that depend on when each happens. Anything a taxpayer owes for an unpaid periodic liquidation sits outside both articles and is the same fact whichever route they take.

The second is the credit. Article 54-bis.1 lets the taxpayer flag “dati o elementi non considerati, o valutati erroneamente” within the sixty days, but the previous year’s credit was not overlooked — it was excluded by the article itself. Neither document says what happens to it after a liquidation that ignored it, and no letters have gone out yet, so the table above is what the rules produce rather than a forecast of what will be collected.

The third is that none of this is a reason to wait. The taxpayer does not choose when the letter comes; the Agenzia has until the end of 2034 to send it, interest accrues in the meantime, the bill cannot be offset or spread, and missing the sixty days trebles the penalty. What the arithmetic shows is that Italy currently charges more for putting an omitted VAT return right than for being found out and paying promptly — which is a fact about how two articles were drafted, not advice about which to rely on.