The Italian Revenue Agency is improving and increasing the range of services delivered to taxpayers. In fact, services provided in 2009 reached the amount of 9,896,089 and rose by 9.86% compared with 2008 (9,016,147). This is due to the simplification process that, together with the IT innovations, aims at guaranteeing citizens even more services, available for everyone. Within this framework and with the scope of strengthening the dialogue between taxpayers and the revenue body, it has been released a new simplified, slim version of the VAT returns addressed to taxpayers performing simplest operations and it has been set up as well a particular e-channels for assisting intermediaries with specific requests.
 
As concerns the assistance delivered by the Contact Centres in 2009, they sent more than 44,000 replies to e-mails, rose by 33% compared with 2008 (33,000), and managed almost 1.7 million phone calls, increased by 19% (in 2008 they were around 1.4 millions). Contact Centres can also perform, by phone, corrective actions concerning notices of irregularities sent to taxpayers but found unlawful; in this specific topic, they managed more than 190,000 requests, registering an increase of 61% compared with the 118,000 requests of 2008.

Other increases to point out in 2009 concern: assistance on special tax schemes (in particular for "minimum taxpayers"), also delivered through a specific on-line tutoring (+77%), facilitations and authorizations (+76%), registration of acts and successions (+30%), the assistance for notices of payments related to tax returns (+27%), information on tax refunds (+11%) and issues, changes and copies of tax codes/health card (+5%). (al.len.)
 

The project of an european common platform on tax enforcement measures has got under way, thanks to an important memorandum of understanding signed by Italian and Spanish Tax Administration.

The agreement aiming at improving the ability to share information between tax enforcement bodies, provides for a strengthened cooperation, simultaneous controls and a more effective communication mechanism in the pursuit to tackle and prevent international tax evasion phenomena.

Under the memorandum, a special focus will be addressed to the investigation and monitoring of different income typologies and components linked to individual taxpayers and companies.
The cooperation will be settled through automatic information exchange, transmission of data and relevant news, and, at the same time, by arranging coordinated enforcement strategies with the involvement of staff members belonging to both Tax Administrations.

Every communication, included information and data, will be set in English and all the issues related to incomes will be transmitted through the Standard Magnetic Format and the Standard Transmission Format  set up by Ocse. (va.ib.)