This is the conduct of a person who omits the payment of taxes by any means or pays them lower than due, causing damage to the State.The quantification of the evasion phenomena is necessarily uncertain and approximate.According to ISTAT, the main components of the undeclared are constituted by the added value hidden through false communications of the turnover and / or costs (under-declaration of the added value) or generated through the use of irregular work.Based on the most recent estimates, the underground economy as a whole was worth approximately 192 billion in 2018, with an incidence of 12.8% on the added value produced by the economic system.Also in 2018, it is believed that the undeclared component attributed to the under-declaration of added value by companies was equal to 95.6 billion (in 2015 it was 93.9 billion);that attributable to the employment of irregular employees amounted, finally, to 78.5 billion (it was 79.7 billion three years earlier).Finally, a final figure concerns VAT (the tax on the exchange of goods and services), which in Italy would seem to be evaded more than in any other European country.It should be clarified that not every conduct of tax evasion, that is the violation of tax obligations towards the Treasury, produces criminal consequences, since it is a question, in the case of minimum amounts, of conduct punished with only the economic administrative sanction.Therefore, this article will deal only with the cases in which such conduct involves assuming criminal findings, thus entailing criminal consequences for the author.Tax evasion assumes criminal relevance whenever the conduct falls within the following:This is the falsification of tax returns or VAT through the indication of fictitious liabilities or through the alteration of invoices.For its existence it is necessary that the tax evaded is greater than 30 thousand euros with reference to each of the individual taxes;undeclared income exceeds 5% of the total (or in any case 1.5 million euros).For this offense, imprisonment from 1 to 6 years is envisaged.In this case, the will to cause fraud is lacking and the crime of tax evasion exists when:The penalty of imprisonment from 1 to 3 years applies.The omitted declaration occurs when the taxpayer does not submit the tax return within 90 days of the expiry of the deadline.The conduct assumes criminal relevance if the amount exceeds € 50,000.00.Regarding the omission of VAT, the punishment threshold is raised to 250 thousand euros.The penalty of imprisonment from 1 to 3 years applies.This is a crime committed by anyone who issues false accounting invoices.In this case, the penalty of imprisonment from 6 months to 6 years applies.The penal sanctions provided for apply only to natural persons, and not to entities.In the case of a company, its representative, a natural person and not a legal person, will be responsible for the crime.There is no provision for the granting of conditional suspension of the sentence if the sums evaded exceed 30% of the turnover or 3 million euros.Tax evasion has two main consequences: a lower entry of money into the state coffers and a distortion of the market.For the first aspect, if we want to hypothesize a linearity between State collections and the re-use of money in services for citizens, the non-payment or partial payment of taxes would result in quantitatively and / or qualitatively lower services provided by Public Administrations, such as: the reduction of services or public expenditure (i.e. the set of expenses incurred for education, subsidies, hospitals and all other public services), or an increase in revenue (compensating for evasion through an increase in taxes to taxpayers who instead do not evade) or, again, with an increase in public debt.On the other hand, as regards the distortion of the market, it derives from the advantage obtained by tax evaders in being able to offer goods and services at more competitive prices than those who pay taxes, as they benefit from lower costs.If the advantage were to persist, this could lead to the exclusion from the market of companies and virtuous professionals, as victims of the described unfair competition.Among the justifications most used by tax evaders are often: the too high level of taxation, a complex tax system in which it is difficult to navigate and the lack of confidence in the use that the state can make of public finances.Formulating a thought on what has been described so far, focusing on the individual motivations of the tax evader and on the ways in which the State has tried to intervene on them, the following considerations can be made (see the model of the Slippery Slope Framework - SSF; Kirchler , 2007; Kirchler et al., 2008).Italy has a historical-social context characterized by a climate of scarce respect and distrust in the institutions which determines an "antagonistic" climate between the taxpayer and the State.In such a context, the only possible approach by the state is to induce the taxpayer to adhere to tax rules through extrinsic reasons such as fines and sanctions, thus adopting a "cops and robbers" approach (Braithwaite, 2003).This type of measure is all the more effective, with the effect of reinforcing compliance by the taxpayer, the less the power of the state is called into question.This happens, for example, when institutions react systematically in sanctioning those who violate the law.On the other hand, on the other hand, in the historical-social contexts characterized by a climate of trust in the institutions, where a vision of exchange with authority prevails, and not of antagonism (Torgler, 2007) - and it is found, therefore, a more evident relationship between the payment of taxes and the provision of services - it would seem that taxpayers are intrinsically motivated to pay taxes honestly and spontaneously, as they would perceive their contribution to the common good through the payment of taxes as a duty. taxes.The interest in knowing the individual motivations of the tax evader in relation to the context in which he acts would therefore lie in the possibility for the State to identify suitable intervention strategies to motivate compliance with tax regulations.In this sense, the norms that establish penal and administrative sanctions (see above) can be configured as "interventions" (on the antagonistic side), but they do not exhaust the field of possibilities.Another example can be found when, in 2011, the Italian state made two institutional commercials aimed at discouraging tax evasion run on television.In the first, easily recognizable public spaces were shown and a voice was heard in the background saying "if so many do not pay taxes, there are no services. If more people pay taxes, services increase. But only when everyone pays them, these services increase. services become really efficient. If everyone pays taxes, taxes pay off everyone - with services. "In the second spot, slides of parasites under the microscope, harmful and visually unpleasant, were shown in sequence, with the caption "Parasita de ....", followed by the name.The penultimate slide showed a close-up of a dark-haired man with an unkempt beard and a wrinkled shirt, with the caption "Parasite of society - tax evader".Although the state approach was innovative, in the light of the scientific studies available at the time, an intervention of this type, aimed at affecting individual motivation, has the limit of not being able to be subjected to verification.Even if, in the hypothesis, an increase in tax revenue (or a decrease in the estimate of the undeclared) had been recorded, in the period following the broadcasting of said advertisements, it would have been extremely difficult, in statistical terms, to attribute this variation exclusively to the effect of the same on the psyche of the Italian people.Lawyer and Doctor of Clinical Psychology@ Copyright 2001 - 2021 Studiocataldi.it Legal newspaper PI IT02324600440