Account emptied without a judge

This article deals exclusively with Italian law — Presidential Decree 602/1973 and the enforcement powers of the Italian Revenue Collection Agency (Agenzia delle Entrate-Riscossione). None of it applies to other jurisdictions, whose debt collection rules are entirely different.

In July 2026 the Italian Revenue Collection Agency announced that roughly 11 million tax collection notices would be sent to individuals, professionals and businesses: one of the largest recovery campaigns in years. Behind that number sits a rule almost nobody has read, on the books since 1999: Article 72-bis of Presidential Decree 602/1973, the decree governing the collection of income taxes. It is the provision that lets the tax authorities order a bank to pay, without going through a judge.

What Article 72-bis says

Ordinary third-party garnishment, the kind found in the code of civil procedure, works like this: the creditor summons both the debtor and the third party who owes the debtor money (the bank, the employer, the tenant), a hearing is held, and an enforcement judge assigns the sums. It is slow, but there is a magistrate in the middle.

Article 72-bis introduces a shortcut reserved for the tax collection agent. The garnishment order, in place of the summons required by Article 543, second paragraph, no. 4 of the code of civil procedure, may directly contain the order to the third party to pay the collection agent:

within sixty days of service, for sums that have already fallen due;
at their respective due dates, for future or recurring sums.

The result is a garnishment that is essentially extrajudicial: no assignment hearing, no judicial order, no prior adversarial process. The bank receives a document, and from that point on it is the bank — not the tax authority — that is legally obliged to pay. The account holder almost always finds out afterwards, by looking at the balance.

This is where the phrase "blocked account" comes from. It is imprecise but not entirely wrong: technically the account is neither closed nor frozen as a whole, it is the garnished amount that is tied up, up to the value of the debt. In practice, for someone who has rent to pay out of it, the difference is theoretical.

Why it is back in the news

The surrounding figures explain the alarm better than the headline number: around 19 million people in Italy have at least one outstanding position with the tax authorities, with an average exposure of about 5,800 euros, and roughly 750,000 enforced collection procedures are already under way. Some reconstructions of the annual plan estimate up to 31 million documents in total for 2026, counting reminders, formal demands and notifications. In August the Agency suspends most of its mailings during the middle of the month, except for positions close to the statute of limitations: a break in the calendar, not a change of direction.

So the news is not a new rule. It is the volume: Article 72-bis has been there for more than twenty years, but it had never been switched on for an audience of this size.

How they reach the account: the chain of documents

There is no button the Government can press to empty Italians' bank accounts. There is a chain of administrative acts, and every link has its own rule and its own deadline.

Tax roll and payment notice. The creditor body (the Revenue Agency, the social security institute, the municipality) hands the claim to the collection agent, who serves the notice.
Sixty days. This is the deadline to pay or to act (installment plan, appeal, self-review). Once that deadline passes without payment, the notice becomes an enforceable title.
The formal demand, if too much time has passed. If enforcement does not begin within one year of service of the notice, a fresh demand to comply within five days is required first (Article 50 of the same decree). It is one of the points where enforcement most often turns out to be defective.
Article 72-bis. At this stage the collection agent can serve the direct order on the bank, without asking any judge for anything.

The question "how can the Government block bank accounts" therefore has a less cinematic answer than the one being told: the Government does not block them. They are blocked by a public economic body supervised by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, on the strength of an enforceable title formed months or years earlier, using an instrument the legislature handed it in 1999 and that Legislative Decree 110/2024 pushed it to use in a planned, systematic way. Political discretion lies in deciding how many positions to work and in what order, not in signing off any individual garnishment.

How much they can take: the 2026 limits

The part almost no viral post mentions is that Article 72-bis is not unlimited. The ceilings are pegged to the social allowance, worth 546.24 euros a month in 2026.

On the bank account. Sums credited as salary or pension before the garnishment can only be touched for the portion exceeding three times the social allowance, that is 1,638.72 euros. And there is a further protection written into Article 72-bis itself: where sums are credited to an account held by the debtor, the garnished third party's obligations do not extend to the last payment credited under the same heading. The most recent salary, in short, stays out of reach.

On wages at source. Here Article 72-ter steps in and, for the collection agent, replaces the general one-fifth rule with a sliding scale based on monthly net pay:

up to 2,500 euros → one tenth;
between 2,500 and 5,000 euros → one seventh;
above 5,000 euros → one fifth.

On pensions. The one-fifth share is calculated only on the portion exceeding twice the social allowance, that is above 1,092.48 euros: below that threshold the pension is untouchable.

Also exempt, under Article 545 of the code of civil procedure, are maintenance payments, welfare benefits and maternity and sickness allowances. Anyone living on an average salary credited to their bank account is, in other words, far less exposed than headline panic suggests. Anyone with cash sitting idle in the account, far more.

The arsenal beyond the account

The bank account is only one of the tools, and not the harshest:

Administrative hold on a vehicle: preceded by a warning giving thirty days to put things right.
Mortgage lien: available for debts of 20,000 euros or more, and it can cover the main home as well.
Real estate foreclosure: possible only above 120,000 euros of debt, and never on the debtor's only property, non-luxury, where they are officially resident. The main home is not shielded from a lien, but it is shielded from forced sale.
Article 48-bis: before paying any amount above 5,000 euros, every public administration must check whether the payee is in default towards the collection agency; if so, the payment stops and goes to the collection agent instead. This is why a public sector supplier with unpaid tax bills never sees the invoice settled.

Privacy and algorithms: where the GDPR comes in

To serve 11 million notices and pick which positions to garnish, you need to know where the money is. That knowledge already exists: it is the Financial Relationships Archive inside the Tax Registry, which holds, for every relationship, its identifying code and the tax codes of the holder, of any joint holders, of delegates and of proxies. The collection agent does not have to look for the account: it already knows where it is.

It is at this layer — not in the enforcement rule — that the rights question is really being played out. The Italian Data Protection Authority has opened investigations into the IT tools used to access the Tax Registry and the Financial Relationships Archive, and has already said no to using data harvested from the web to build tax evasion risk profiles. The direction of travel — algorithmic selection of which positions to work, risk scores, annual planning agreed with the Ministry — is precisely the ground on which the European data protection regulation has something to say: legal basis, proportionality, purpose limitation, automated decision-making.

The garnishment, in short, is the last visible link in a chain that begins much earlier, inside a database.

How to defend yourself

Article 72-bis skips the judge beforehand, not afterwards. The routes remain open, but they are time-barred:

Check service of the payment notice. A garnishment based on a notice that was never validly served is statistically the most rewarding challenge.
If service was regular, however, not having read it changes nothing. This is the flip side of the previous point, and the one that surprises people most. Service is completed when the law says it happened, not when the recipient opens the envelope: the presumption of knowledge in Article 1335 of the civil code applies, so a document that reaches the recipient's address is deemed known to them unless they prove they were, through no fault of their own, unable to learn of it. For businesses and professionals the notice travels by certified email to the address held in the public registers and is completed on the delivery receipt, even if the mailbox is never opened — and if that mailbox is full or no longer active, the law provides an alternative route, with electronic filing and notice to the recipient. For everyone else there is constructive service: recipient absent, envelope held at the post office, document deemed served once the holding period expires, even if it goes back unclaimed. Anyone who has moved without updating their registered address cannot object that nothing ever arrived. From that moment the sixty days run, the notice becomes an enforceable title, and the order can reach the bank without the debtor having read a single line: the only genuinely preventive defence is to check your certified mailbox and your debt position in the Agency's private area on a regular basis.
Check the statute of limitations. Five years for social security contributions and local taxes, ten for state taxes according to the prevailing view: many claims still in circulation are already dead.
Opposition to enforcement (Article 615) where the right to proceed at all is disputed, and opposition to enforcement acts (Article 617) for formal defects and for exceeding the garnishment limits. Mind the division of jurisdiction: challenges going to the merits of the tax claim stay before the tax court.
Spread the payments. The most mundane defence is also the most effective: for applications filed in 2025 and 2026 the ordinary plan runs to 84 installments, rising to 96 in 2027-2028 and 108 from 2029, with plans of up to 120 installments in cases of proven hardship. An approved plan blocks the start of new enforcement actions.
Sometimes waiting pays. For claims handed over from 1 January 2025, Legislative Decree 110/2024 provides for automatic write-off of sums not collected by 31 December of the fifth year following the handover.
The rule's geographical boundary. An order under Article 72-bis is an Italian administrative act: it binds a third party located in Italy, not a foreign bank, which has no duty whatsoever to comply. Outside the European Union it also loses the fast track for assistance in recovery under Directive 2010/24/EU (transposed by Legislative Decree 149/2012), through which one member state can have another collect a claim on its behalf. And in a jurisdiction that has not signed up to the Common Reporting Standard — the OECD standard for the automatic exchange of financial data, adopted by 126 jurisdictions and notably not by the United States, which runs its own FATCA — that account is not even automatically reported to the Italian Revenue Agency. This describes a limit of the rule, however, not a shortcut: a foreign account must still be declared in the tax return's foreign assets schedule, an undeclared balance is presumed to have been built from income withheld from taxation (Article 12 of Decree-Law 78/2009), and moving funds to defeat collection amounts to the criminal offence of fraudulent evasion of tax payment (Article 11 of Legislative Decree 74/2000), punishable by six months to four years' imprisonment above 50,000 euros in taxes, penalties and interest, and one to six years above 200,000. The line between lawful planning and concealment runs exactly here, and staying on the right side of it takes advice, structure and capital: the very means that whoever is on the receiving end of Article 72-bis does not have.

Who picks up the bill

So much for the rules and the figures; what follows is a point of view. Eleven million collection notices are not tax fairness: they are cash. A state scraping the bottom of the barrel goes where reaching costs least, and today the cheapest target is the current account of someone who has nothing else. Layered assets, interposed companies, property abroad, liquidity outside the Italian banking system: Article 72-bis never touches them. It touches the person keeping two thousand euros aside to reach the end of the month.

The collection figures bear it out: 5,800 euros of average exposure across 19 million positions. This is not the ledger of major tax evaders but that of struggling sole traders, unpaid vehicle taxes, missed contributions, fines. A claim the treasury knows to be largely unrecoverable — in 2024 it granted itself automatic write-off after five years for precisely that reason — and presses all the same: trying is almost free, and every euro that comes back is a euro it need not ask for elsewhere.

The circle closes when you look at where that money had gone out. The 2022 fuel excise cut cost the public budget around 7 billion euros, approaching 9 with the monthly extensions, and according to distributional analyses two thirds of the benefit went to the wealthier half of the population: higher earners drive more. From 1 January 2026 the books are squared from the opposite side, with petrol and diesel realigned to the same rate of 67.29 cents per litre — minus 4.05 on the former, plus 4.05 on the latter — and around 552 million euros of additional revenue in 2026 alone. An indirect tax, which relative to income bites far harder at the bottom than at the top.

Blanket discounts when consensus is needed, enforcement and higher prices at the pump when liquidity is needed. No conspiracy, merely a hierarchy of priorities repeated often enough to have become a habit. The most uncomfortable fact remains: a solid state would not need 750,000 enforcement procedures to lick its wounds.

Article 72-bis is not a new rule, nor a secret one, nor an unconstitutional one: it is the shortcut the legislature handed the tax authorities more than twenty years ago, and that is only now being used on an industrial scale. The surprise, if anything, is that people still discover it from their bank statement rather than from the Official Gazette.

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