I’ll explain how and why the government intervened on the Superbonus
The government's objectives with the Superbonus decree and the buboes to be resolved. The analysis of Enrico Zanetti, tax expert, former Deputy Minister of Economy and Finance, current adviser to the Minister of Economy, Giancarlo Giorgetti
WHAT THE GOVERNMENT DECREE ON THE SUPERBONUS PROVIDES
Stop the purchases of tax credits by Municipalities and Regions; certainty on the obligations of the purchasers of the tax credits which allow them to be excluded from the risks of joint and several tax liability for negligent participation in the violation; continuation of the possibility of benefiting from building bonuses through discount or transfer options until the natural expiry envisaged by art. 121 of Legislative Decree 34/2020 (2024 and, for the superbonus 2025) only for expenses relating to works whose qualifications have been requested by the date of entry into force of the decree.
These, in extreme synthesis, are the three "moves" of the Government on the increasingly heated issue of tax credits deriving from building bonuses, to which a special decree-law passed during yesterday's Council of Ministers was dedicated. Legislative Decree February 16, 2023 n. 11 was then published in the evening in a second edition of the Official Gazette, no. 40, and enters into force today.
THE BUBBLE OF SUPERBONUS TAX CREDIT
It now seems clear that the tax credits, "generated" by the options pursuant to art. 121 of Legislative Decree 34/2020 on the costs of subsidized building interventions with the superbonus and other deductions, are victims of their own (messy) success and of the surprising underestimation that had allowed their introduction in 2020 and its extension to the end of 2021. In other words, the problem is not a philosophical one of accounting classifications, but a material one of volumes.
As at 31 December 2022, the tax credits "generated" by the aforementioned options already amounted to around 105 billion euro and it is easy to predict that, with the submission by 16 March of the queue of option communications referable to deductible expenses incurred in 2022, the cumulative effect of the tax credits "generated" pursuant to art. 121 of Legislative Decree 34/2020 between 2020, 2021 and 2022, will reach around 120 billion euros.
THE PHENOMENON OF WRONG LOANS
Simply too many, both due to the market's orderly absorption capacity on the demand side for the purchase of credits (with the consequent explosion, on the one hand, of the phenomenon of "stranded" credits in the tax drawers of supplier companies that have applied discounts in invoice and, on the other hand, of speculative phenomena with operators who, more or less consciously, buy by applying usurious financial discount rates), and due to the financially sustainable absorption capacity of the State.
THE ACTIVISM OF MUNICIPALITIES AND REGIONS
The launch by Municipalities and Regions of credit purchases (possibility cut short by the decree without any type of accompanying transitional discipline) was the litmus test of a now mad mayonnaise but, probably, also the drop that made the eyes of the government, an intervention aimed at stopping the blender, accompanying previous problems with solutions and safeguarding legitimate reliance on the present, cannot be postponed, although certainly not pleasant and even more certainly not "popular".
WHICH SOLUTION FOR STRANDED LOANS
In order to facilitate the solution of the past record ("substandard" credits), the method was chosen to give certainties, in terms of responsibility, to banks and other potential buyers, expressly indicating which types of "credit quality checks" exclude any culpable hypothesis on the part of the buyer who is given a credit based on a non-existent or not due deduction.
THE ROLE OF BANKS ON THE SUPERBONUS
In this way, the banks, whose 2022 financial statements will tell a lot about those who have benefited most of all from the discipline of sales, will be able to easily resell and make new purchases, because, if it is true that not even they would have spaces of "capacity tax" to buy another 100 billion credits, space for another 10-15 (this is roughly the size of the "stranded" phenomenon) they do indeed have.
THE RATIO OF THE GOVERNMENT'S INTERVENTION ON THE SUPERBONUS
At this point in the story, the alternative was probably between a stop and go of this type (because it is unthinkable that discounts and sales will not come back tomorrow, even if limited to the most "significant" interventions of energy efficiency and seismic risk reduction) and a drift from objectively unpredictable final results for both the private and public parts.
(Excerpt from an analysis published on Eutekne.info ; here the complete version )
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/vi-spiego-come-e-perche-il-governo-e-intervenuto-sul-superbonus/ on Fri, 17 Feb 2023 07:58:19 +0000.