"After the sentence passed on January 28 by the European Court of Justice against our country, will we be called upon to pay a maximum fine of € 2 billion?"
The question was asked by the coordinator of the CGIA Studies Office, Paolo Zabeo, who, according to what some authoritative experts said in the last few rounds, the systematic delays in payments made by our Public Administration (PA) could trigger a maximum fine such as the one received for milk quotas which, up to now, has cost us about 2 billion euros. All this, however, can be avoided if the Italian state puts an end to this bad habit very quickly. Assumptions, given the performance achieved in 2019, difficult to implement.
“Although the situation has improved in recent years, especially following the introduction of electronic invoicing - continues Zabeo - late payments in commercial transactions with the PA still constitute a very widespread malpractice in our country. Therefore, it will not be taken for granted at all to avoid an economic sanction from Europe ”.
- The Municipality of Naples pays one year late
Also in 2019 delays in payments by the state and its local divisions were widespread. If Directive 2011/7 / EU imposes, in commercial transactions between PA and private companies, payment terms of no more than 30 or 60 days (in the latter case only for the healthcare sector), for example, last year, the Municipality of Naples wound up its suppliers with an average delay of 395 days; the Asl Napoli 1 Centro with 169; the Municipality of Reggio Calabria with 146, the Basilicata Region with 83, the ASL Roma 1 with 72 and the Municipality of Roma Capitale with 63.
Situations, the latter, which will be extremely difficult to reset in a reasonably short time. A condition, as mentioned above, indispensable for Brussels to spare us a fine. Not to mention that in the health and construction sectors, the delays, compared to the maximum waiting times established by law, are exceeded, according to the surveys carried out by the business associations in these sectors, by an average of 39 and 73 days respectively. Delays which, unfortunately, can hardly be quickly brought back below the limits set by the regulations.
“Our PA - declares the CGIA secretary Renato Mason - in particular in the South continues to pay with totally unjustified delays. This situation, associated with the persistent contraction in bank lending to companies, has worsened the financial stability of many small production companies that traditionally are undercapitalized and run out of liquidity ".
- Despite the requirement for electronic invoicing, the debt stock is unknown
The most absurd thing about this whole story is that nobody is able to say exactly how much the commercial debt of our PA is, despite the fact that the companies that work for it have been obliged to issue the electronic invoice for several years. How do payments work in these commercial transactions? Once issued, the electronic invoice passes through a platform controlled by the Ministry of Economy and Finance (Siope +) which routes it to the body or public structure to which it is addressed which, in turn, verifies whether the payment is certain , liquid and collectable. Once the recipient of the invoice gives his consent, the payment should pass through the platform, allowing the department of the economy to instantly monitor the payment times and the amount of the outputs.
Although this practice started gradually from July 2017, the State does not yet know how much the debt contracted by all the public administrations with its suppliers amounts to, simply because a large part of public procurers, in particular the peripheral entities, make payments without passing through the platform and with deadlines well beyond those established by law.
- According to the Bank of Italy estimates, they are 53 billion
According to the data reported in the "2018 Annual Report", presented on May 31, 2019 by the Bank of Italy, the total amount of our PA's trade payables would amount to approximately 53 billion euros, half of which attributable to late payment.
The use of the conditional is a must, given that the periodic monitoring conducted by the researchers in via Nazionale is based on sample surveys conducted on the companies and by the supervisory reports from which results emerge which, according to the same drafters of the estimates, are characterized by a high degree of uncertainty.
- The Constitutional Court has also recently intervened
With sentence no. 4 of 28 January, the Constitutional Court established that the advances of liquidity obtained by local authorities to honor past liabilities are loans of an exceptional nature which must be used for the purpose for which they were disbursed and not for improve budget results. The sentence therefore definitively closes a controversy raised by the Court of Auditors against the Municipality of Naples. In the recent past, in fact, there have been few Mayors and even Governors who have used the state debt-relief loans disbursed since 2013 to settle the budgets of Municipalities / Regions, rather than to settle the old invoices of their suppliers. A conduct that the Constitutional Court has finally clarified that it can no longer be practiced.
- Why does the PA pay late?
The main causes that gave rise to this typically Italian bad habit are the following:
- the lack of liquidity by the public client;
- intentional delays;
- the inefficiency of many administrations to issue payment certificates in a reasonably short time;
- disputes that lengthen the settlement of invoices.
To these reasons must be added at least two others which, among other things, have led the European Court of Justice to condemn us in the past few weeks. They are:
- the request, often made by the PA towards the executors of the works, to delay the issue of the progress of the works or the sending of invoices;
- the request made by the Public Administration to the supplier to accept, during the signing of the contract, payment times exceeding the limits established by law without the application of default interest in case of delay.