Amid crisis, Italy confronts a culture of tax evasion

By Anthony Faiola,
WashPost
Published: November 24

ROME — In this nation where tax evasion can be considered part of a solid business plan, even dentists and hairdressers demand payment in cash — payments that then frequently vanish from accounting books like so many Cheshire cats.

But as the world’s eighth-largest economy struggles to pull back from the brink of a debt crisis that has much of the financial world on edge, Italy may be on the verge of a national reckoning over one of its most vexing financial — and cultural — problems: tax cheats.

Crisis-weary Maura Corinaldesi, for instance, joined a fast-growing Facebook group this month called “Friends of the Receipts” with more than 4,000 members naming and shaming tax-dodging trattorias and invoice-allergic plumbers. Corinaldesi, a 30-year-old public servant, took it one step further, calling the cops on a recent afternoon when a fruit vendor refused her a receipt.

A poll released this week by the Italian polling firm Demopolis found that 73 percent of Italians surveyed are now demanding tougher action against evasion.
Italy’s financial police are even taking the fight to elementary schools, trying to nip in the bud a cultural exaltation of the smartest evaders with a comic strip starring Finzy, a cute feathery cop who busts jewelry-wearing tax cheats and sniffs out loot stashed in exotic tax havens.

(More here.)