Building-bonus tax credits were created without checks, and if one is fake, the buyer pays

29 September 2026, 21:46

In the province of Barletta-Andria-Trani, in Apulia, according to the Guardia di Finanza (Italy's financial police), some professionals took the records of homes already renovated under the building bonuses and used them to create new tax credits, several times over, without a single job being done. The owners knew nothing about it. The court in Trani has seized €88 million. It was a fraud: money taken from the State, which means from everyone who pays taxes.

The trick worked because a building bonus is not a refund: it is a credit, the right to pay less tax, and since 2020 almost all of them can be sold on like a cheque. To create one, all it takes is an online notice to the Italian Revenue Agency: the owner's tax code, the details of the property, the amount spent. Anyone who already held the records of a real home could send them in again, with invented expenses, as many times as they liked.

And nobody checked. Outside the Superbonus, until the anti-fraud decree of November 2021, nobody even had to sign off that the work had been done. And to do the work, a VAT number was enough: builders' qualification only became compulsory in 2023, and only above €516,000. Between July and September 2020 almost 5,000 more building firms were set up: new firms, with no track record and no guarantee of reliability.

Then there is the question of who pays. In 2020 the Revenue Agency wrote that a buyer who acquired the credit in good faith «does not lose the right to use the tax credit». In 2024 the Court of Cassation, Italy's highest court, said the opposite: a fake credit can be seized even from someone who is «extraneous to the offence and in good faith». It is like buying a used car with its papers in order and finding out it was stolen: the car goes back, and you are left holding the receipt.

So the question, for the State: it let credits be created without checking anything and let them circulate like money. Why should the bill for the checks it never made be paid by those who bought them, trusting its own guidance?

Those who manufactured the fake credits will have to answer for fraud. Those who bought them, meanwhile, see them frozen.

This article was prompted by a news item published in Il Sole 24 Ore.