Personal blog

In July 2026 Italy's tax collection agency announced around 11 million payment notices, and behind that number lies Article 72-bis of Presidential Decree 602/1973, a 1999 rule that lets the tax authorities order a bank directly to pay, with no hearing and no judge. What is new is not the rule but the volume. The account is reached at the end of a chain of acts, from the payment notice through the sixty days to the order to the bank, and seizures have precise limits linked to the social allowance: on the account the last salary payment is protected, on wages the brackets of Article 72-ter apply, and pensions are untouchable below 1,092.48 euros. Besides the account there are vehicle seizures, mortgages, foreclosure and the blocking of public payments, and upstream sits the register of financial relationships, where the GDPR battle is fought.

You defend yourself by checking the notification, which is valid even if the envelope was never opened, the limitation period, the legal challenges and above all instalment plans; a foreign account escapes the order, but moving money to evade it is a crime. Hence the point of view: eleven million notices are about cash, not tax justice, and they hit people with two thousand euros in the bank, not large fortunes, in a state that hands out blanket discounts when it needs consensus and forced collection when it needs liquidity. The surprise is that people keep finding out from their bank statement rather than from the Official Gazette.

July 2026 put four dossiers on the lawmakers' desk which, read together, tell where the country is heading. INPS presents itself as a "welfare workshop", but behind the slogan pensions rely more and more on general taxation, with a gap of about 77 billion a year between benefits and contributions. Differentiated autonomy is back on track, with the Senate approving the preliminary agreements despite the Constitutional Court's cuts and the referendum declared inadmissible, while the accounts and the issue of the essential service levels remain open.

The "Stabilicum", passed at first reading by the Chamber, brings closed lists without preference votes and a fixed majority bonus at 42%, with constitutional doubts already on record. The "save-Roggero" rule in the Security bill, which denies compensation to anyone injured while committing serious crimes, would not even save Roggero and raises an equality issue. All but autonomy are still proposals, and they should be followed by telling the announcement from the law and the law from its real effects.

The Government is discussing very expensive compact nuclear power plants, but given Italy's financial constraints it remains unclear who will pay for them. An enabling law cannot print the funds that are missing, which raises the suspicion that its real purpose is simply to block the referendum.