VATICAN:When in government, you need all the help you can get. At least that seems to be the view of Italian prime minister Romano Prodi who this week called on the Catholic Church to help his campaign against tax evasion, writes Paddy Agnewin Rome.
In an interview with the Catholic weekly, Famiglia Cristiana, the prime minister suggested perhaps that the church could do more to discourage the scourge of systematic tax evasion in Italy: "To defeat tax evasion, we've all got to do our duty, so that way everyone will have to pay less . . . Everyone has to do their bit, including teachers and the church. Why is it when I go to Mass that this subject, which clearly has a serious ethical dimension, is almost never touched on in sermons? Is it possible that out of 40 million taxpayers only 300,000 declare an income of more than €100,000 per annum?"
Senior Catholic church figures, however, rejected the prime minister's unexpected criticism. Mgr Domenico Calcagno, formerly bishop of Savona and now secretary of the Apostolic Seat's Patrimony (a sort of Holy See finance ministry), staunchly defended the church's teaching on tax evasion, saying: "The church has dealt with this matter on many occasions. We all accept and propose this line [that no one evades] and that comes from the Catholic morality of the common good. It is the civic responsibility of everyone to pay their taxes, a responsibility from which even the church is not exempt."
Taxation rates in Italy are among the highest in Europe with corporation tax at 37 per cent compared with the European Union average of 24.2 per cent. Earlier this year, economy minister Tommaso Padoa Schioppa claimed tax evasion in Italy is now running at an annual €100 billion or approximately 7 per cent of Italian gross domestic product.
According to the government, this evasion rate is almost double that of France, Germany and Britain, and four times that of Austria, The Netherlands and Ireland.
Mr Prodi has made the war on tax evasion a key element in his centre-left government's fiscal policies. Such has been the success of the campaign so far, he claims, that it has contributed to a 6 per cent rise in state revenues in the first half of 2007.