The Italian Tax Revenue Agency has recently refocused on several aspects of the tax debt restructuring process, including amending, in some cases, what was stated in Circular no. 16 of July 23, 2018.
The Agency still considers the revenues generated during the procedure of composition with creditors as "endogenous" and not "exogenous" finance. However, at present the Agency believes that these revenues should not be considered in the comparison between what the Agency would have earned by putting the company into liquidation and what has been offered by the company in its proposal of composition with creditors. Moreover, with regard to the criteria to be applied for establishing the order in which the creditors will be satisfied, the Agency seems more willing to accept the "relative priority" criterion rather than the "top priority" one.
This is a concession that, like the one concerning the possibility of giving "strategic" creditors more favorable treatment than the one provided for the Agency, makes the recovery of companies in crisis less difficult. Further valuable clarifications concern the following aspects: the certification of tax debts; the coordination of the ongoing tax debt restructuring with all legal instruments made available by the Agency in order to avoid a litigation and the possibility to include them in a single procedure; the criteria that the offices must adopt in order to identify the competent office and the evaluation of the agreements reached during the tax debt restructuring process.
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