The bank assessment to be paid by the entrepreneurs and on the documentation necessary to justify the cash payments made on the Bank account they are legitimate. This was established by the Court of Cassation with ordinance no. 15538/2020.
The sentence
The case examined by the judges of the Court concerned an assessment notice, with which the Revenue Agency had challenged a shopkeeper for failing to report revenues from the sale of monopoly and bar products because of cash payments of 500 thousand euros unjustified found after the activation of bank investigations. The entrepreneur had challenged the tax deed and the judges of first instance had given him reason, considering the justification put forward by the taxpayer valid, which showed how the amount of cash paid was congruent with the revenues declared in the tax period as the result of the sales of the monopoly products and bar takings. This decision was later confirmed on appeal by the Regional Tax Commission.
The tax authorities then appealed to the Supreme Court contesting the violation of article 32 of Presidential Decree no. 600/1973 since the Ctr did not take into account the principle according to which the data and elements drawn from bank investigations are placed at the basis of the adjustments and assessments if the taxpayer does not prove that he has taken them into account for the determination of the income subject to tax or which have no relevance to the same end.
The Court of Cassation considered this ground of appeal to be well founded, given that the entrepreneur had not been able to produce accounting documentation capable of analytically justifying the income nature of the cash payments found by the Guardia di Finanza and disputed on the current account. Furthermore, for evidential purposes, the adoption of a simplified accounting regime – which according to the entrepreneur did not make such checks possible – and the generic correspondence between the recorded revenues and payments is in no way relevant.
The trial judge must obligatorily operate a rigorous verification of the demonstrative effectiveness of the evidence provided by the taxpayer to justify each individual movement ascertained (in this sense Cassation no. 21800/2017), evaluating the objective data, constituted in this case by the amount of payments into the current account greater than that justified, placed at the basis of the motivation of the tax deed of the financial administration (see Cassation nos.
The judges of merit of the case examined, on the other hand, limited themselves to finding a potential correspondence between the amount of the payments and that declared, omitting any evaluation of the objective data, consisting of the amount of payments into the current account of an amount greater than the amount justified, violating article 32 of Presidential Decree no. 600/1973, as legitimately claimed by the tax authorities.
– .
