This page will hold short notes on the things that recur in the work. There are none yet, and saying so seems better than filling the space with material nobody needed. What follows instead is the Italian calendar worth knowing, how to read a notice before the amount on it frightens you, and which documents to keep.
There are no published articles here yet. The page exists because there will be, and because an empty section labelled as empty is more useful than a page of filler assembled to look established. Nothing below is a summary of somebody else's news and nothing links to an archive that does not exist.
What will appear here are short notes drawn from actual files: a deadline that moved and what it does to a non resident, how a particular kind of Italian notice is built and which line on it matters, what a change in the rules means for someone who owns a flat in Italy and lives elsewhere. Each will be written when there is something worth saying rather than on a publishing schedule, which is why there is nothing here today.
Italian deadlines are extended and rearranged often enough that memorising the whole calendar is a waste of effort. A handful of dates, however, have stayed put for years and cover most of what a foreign client with Italian interests will ever meet.
The local property tax, due in two payments: the first by 16 June for the first half of the year, the balance by 16 December. It is owed by the owner whether or not the property is let, whether or not it is used, and it is calculated by each municipality at its own rate.
The balance for the year just ended and the first payment on account fall due on 30 June, with a short deferral available at a small surcharge. The second payment on account falls on 30 November. These are payment dates, and they arrive before the return itself is filed.
The personal return, Modello Redditi PF, and the corporate returns are transmitted electronically in the autumn. The exact day has been moved more than once in recent years, so it is one of the few dates worth confirming each season rather than assuming.
Monthly filers settle VAT by the 16th of the following month. Quarterly filers settle by the 16th of the second month after the quarter, with a small interest charge, and also file the periodic communication of settlements, the LIPE. The annual VAT return goes in between February and April.
The figure printed on an Italian notice is the part everybody reads first and the part that tells you least. Four other elements decide what the document actually is, what can still be done about it and how long you have to do it. Find them in this order.
The Agenzia delle Entrate assesses. The Agenzia delle Entrate-Riscossione collects what has already been assessed. A comune bills local taxes. The three mean different stages, different offices and different routes, and the sender is printed at the top.
Not the date printed inside the document. The date it was notified to you, which is on the envelope, the postal receipt or the certified email delivery receipt. Every term runs from that date, so keeping the envelope matters as much as keeping the notice.
There is always one, usually stated near the end. Sixty days to challenge an assessment is the common case, but the term to pay, the term to ask for instalments and the term to challenge are different things with different consequences for missing them.
Almost never one number. Capital, interest, penalties, collection charges and notification costs are usually broken out in a table towards the back. Components age at different speeds, and the breakdown is where a claim is either confirmed or found wanting.
Almost every file that becomes expensive does so because a document existed once and nobody can find it now. Italian offices are entitled to ask years after the event, and the burden of showing that something was paid or filed generally sits with the taxpayer.
Purchase deeds, succession filings, cadastral records and mortgage documents. Keep them permanently. They are the base cost of a property and they will be needed on a future sale or estate.
The Italian civil code requires books, ledgers and the supporting correspondence to be kept for ten years from the last entry. For a company this is not optional and it applies to electronic records too.
Filed returns and the F24 receipts that paid them. Keep them until the assessment terms expire, which run to the end of the fifth year after the one in which the return was filed, and longer where no return was filed at all.
IMU and waste tax receipts, municipality by municipality and year by year. Five years is the usual working horizon, and the receipt is often the only thing that stops a claim that was already paid.
The lease, the registration receipt, any option elected on it and the annual payments. Keep them for the life of the contract and for five years after it ends.
The envelope of every notice, or the certified email receipt. It carries the notification date, and the notification date is what decides whether a term has expired.
Yes, and it is the fastest way to get one written. Questions that arrive twice from different clients are the ones worth answering in public, so if something in your own file was hard to find an answer to, saying so is genuinely useful. Ask by writing to the firm and name the situation rather than the abstract topic: a question about one real document produces a better note than a request for an overview.
There is no mailing list and nothing here collects an address for one. If you want to be told when something is published, write and ask, and you will be. Clients receive what affects their own position directly, when it happens, which is a different thing from a monthly bulletin and considerably more useful.
No. What is written here is general, and general is exactly what fails in Italian administration, because a date that binds one taxpayer does not bind another with a different residence, a different regime or a different type of property. Use it to recognise what you are looking at. Do not use it to decide whether to pay something.
You check them, and so do we. Italian deadlines are extended, shifted and occasionally rearranged in the middle of a season, and filing dates in particular have moved more than once in recent years. The dates below are the stable ones, which is why they are the ones worth learning, and they are still verified before anything is acted on.
If a question in your own file was hard to find an answer to, it is probably hard for somebody else too. Name the situation and it goes on the list of things worth writing about, and meanwhile you get an answer to yours.