Disposable cooperatives: the tax debt dies with the cooperative, the cheap labour stays with whoever uses it

7 October 2026, 18:21

Rome, 7 October. The Guardia di Finanza, Italy's financial police, announces house arrest for an accountant and the seizure of over €14 million from eight suspects. According to the prosecution, four cooperatives belonging to the same consortium hired 2,478 workers on paper, who were employed on a permanent basis by companies in catering, private security and business services under contracting or secondment agreements that, in the financial police's view, did not meet the legal requirements. The charges: invoices for services never performed, fictitious tax credits used to offset payments, VAT and withholding tax not paid, falsified certificates of social security compliance.

Once they had built up "multi-million debts that the Treasury cannot collect", the cooperatives were put into liquidation or left to go bankrupt and "immediately replaced by new corporate structures ready to regenerate the unlawful mechanism". Nobody has been convicted so far.

The trick is a separation. The work stays with the company that uses it; the debt stays with the cooperative, built to die. The seizure is worth more than €5,600 per worker; the press release does not say which period, or what share of the damage, it corresponds to.

It is the shop with the "closing down, everything must go" sign that has been in the window for ten years. Except that here the clearance sale is paid for by others: the State, which collects nothing; the workers, left, according to the financial police, without pension and insurance cover; and the sound businesses, which do pay contributions and have to compete with those who sell the same hour without the taxes in it.

The bigger problem is that the law has already written a check against this trick. Since 2020, Article 17-bis of Legislative Decree 241 of 1997 has required the client, that is the company that awards a supplier more than €200,000 a year of services consisting mainly of labour working on its premises and with its equipment, to obtain every month the payment forms with which the supplier pays the workers' withholding tax, without being allowed to offset it against credits. If the forms or the payments are missing, the client withholds part of what it owes; if it does not check, it pays a sum equal to the supplier's penalty. Exemption requires a certificate from the Italian Revenue Agency, which calls for at least three years in business. The check, in other words, falls to the only link in the chain that saves money by skipping it. It is like asking someone who hired the plumber "cash, no invoice" to make sure the invoice arrives.

The genuine compliance certificate, the DURC, can be found by anyone with access to the INPS (Italian social security) and INAIL portals, using the company's tax code. A fake one only works with people who do not go and look.

So the question, for the companies that had those workers on their premises every day: did anyone ever ask for the withholding tax payment forms, and what did they say?

The cooperatives closed one after another. The discount on the hour of labour always stayed open.

This article was prompted by a news item published in La Capitale on 7 October 2026.