IMU should not be paid on illegally occupied properties. Provided, however, that the owner has promptly reported the occupation within the framework of criminal proceedings. This was established by the Constitutional Court, which – with judgment no. 60 – declared the constitutional illegibility of art. 9, paragraph 1, of the legislative decree of March 14, 2011 (“Provisions concerning municipal fiscal federalism”) in the part in which it provides that the IMU is not due for illegally occupied properties for which a complaint has been filed on time in a criminal location. With this decision, the Council is therefore acting to defend the owners of occupied properties, public or private, who have paid the IMU into the coffers of the Municipalities until 2022.
“We cannot tax non-existent wealth”
The question was raised by the tax section of the Court of Cassation for violation of the articles. 3, first paragraph, 53, first paragraph, 42, second paragraph, Constitution and 1 Add. ECHR, contrary to the principles of ability to pay, fiscal equality, reasonableness and protection of private property”, because for real estate illegally occupied and whose eviction is prevented for reasons beyond the control of the taxpayer, the tax requirement would be lacking, or the effective and concrete exercise of the powers of disposal and enjoyment of the property According to the judges, in fact, “it is undeniable that in cases where a property has been occupied in explicit conflict with the property. will of the owner and where eviction is excluded for reasons beyond the control of the taxpayer, the fundamental condition of the ability to pay would be lacking: the effective and concrete exercise of the powers of disposal and enjoyment of the property. – specifies the Court – we would end up taxing non-existent wealth when, on the contrary, any tax levy must have a justifying cause by concretely revealing indices of wealth.
The December 29, 2022 rule has been extended retroactively
The Court's decision does not bring anything new. However, it retroactively extends the rule recently introduced by the Meloni government (No. 197 of 2022, effective January 1, 2023) which did not cover the past. Article 1 of the aforementioned regulation specifies that “unusable or available real estate, for which a report has been presented to the Authority, is exempt from the tax for the period of the year during which the prescribed conditions exist. in relation to the offenses referred to in Articles 614, second paragraph, or 633 of the Penal Code or for which illegal occupation has been filed or criminal legal action has been initiated.
Estimates
In the technical report to the 2023 budget, which introduced the exemption from the IMU for owners of illegally occupied properties, the executive presented a series of estimates, recalls The messenger. Occupied properties, according to data from Federcasa, there were about 48 thousand of them. And for the construction of public housing, the IMU's annual income from occupied houses amounts to around 26 million euros. Thirteen million are those owed to individuals. But given that criminal prosecutions for unarchived illegal occupations – explains the Roman newspaper – amount to just over 7 thousand per year, the government has added another 34 million in lost revenue. The lower IMU for occupied homes would essentially be 73 million per year. Multiplied by four years, that gives 292 million.
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