To be let off, you must have collected the money you never collected
23 September 2026, 22:32
Bari. A curtain company declares its VAT for 2016 and doesn't pay it: €539,956. Trial court, October 2023: conviction. Appeal, February 2025: upheld. Court of Cassation, June this year: upheld. Six months' imprisonment for the legal representative.
The tax was due on invoices issued. Not on invoices collected.
This is the first part of the mechanism, and it sits in article 10-ter of Legislative Decree 74 of 2000: when VAT declared and not paid exceeds €250,000 in a year, and is not paid by 31 December of the following year, the risk is “imprisonment from six months to two years”.
With VAT at 22 per cent, that €250,000 is the tax on roughly €1.14 million of invoices. Issued, declared, and perhaps never paid by anyone.
In 2024 Parliament wrote a way out: a ground for non-punishability, that is the case in which the offence stands but nobody is convicted. The wording is this: anyone who fails to pay because of “causes not attributable to the offender arising after the collection of value added tax” is not punishable.
Arising after the collection.
The Court of Cassation has already drawn its boundaries, with judgment 16526, filed on 2 May 2025. The principle: the liquidity crisis, and also the causes that produced it, must have arrived AFTER the tax was collected. A crisis that was already there beforehand saves nobody. And proving that it arrived afterwards is up to the defendant.
In plain terms. When a customer pays an invoice, along with the price they also pay the VAT: that money comes into the company and has to be passed on to the State. The 2024 way out only applies to those who collected that VAT from the customer and then, because of trouble that came later, were no longer able to pay it over. Anyone who was already in difficulty beforehand, or who never saw that invoice paid, is left out.
So the question, for whoever wrote that rule: how can a crisis arise after the collection when it stems from the fact that there was no collection?
The answer is not in the text of the law.
What is there instead, three lines further down, is the list of what the judge must assess. It includes a crisis due to “the uncollectability of receivables”: invoices that will never be collected.
The very condition the previous line rules out.
For anyone running a company, the situation is this. The customer doesn't pay. The VAT on that invoice has to be paid all the same. If the unpaid tax exceeds €250,000, you end up before a criminal court. And there, to be acquitted, you have to prove that the money had arrived and then disappeared: anyone who never saw it does not qualify for that way out.
That rule was written by someone who has never had a customer who doesn't pay.
The rulings cited are Court of Cassation, criminal section, no. 16526/2025 and no. 20385/2026: their full text was not read; the published commentaries reporting them were, and were compared with one another.