They said yes. And made him sign something. The usual documento. They also said that even if he did want to charge VAT on the job, they wouldn’t pay it, but would deduct it from his salary.
Had any of the other thirty or so lettori opted for this alternative? he asked.
And was told none. Because it wasn’t necessary.
But being a cautious lad, my friend also had an accountant. And went to see him. To clear the matter up. The accountant, however, could do nothing more than offer a second equally mystifying ‘explanation’ which simply defied comprehension, perhaps because, as the accountant readily admitted, the law in many areas was not only unclear, but frankly contradictory. It also changed with great regularity, and often government decrees, which were officially law, were not ratified by parliament and thus not only ceased to be law but were deemed never to have been law in the first place. Basically, my friend could do what he wanted. Since everybody else at the university was doing precisely that, my friend took this wise advice. He worked, he got paid and, at least in this regard, was happy.
Four years later he received a small white card in his mailbox. From the VAT office. He was required to present himself with great urgency, indeed within a date already past, for the printed card had taken more than a week to travel the six kilometres from the centre of town to his modest flat in the outlying village.
He got on his moped and rushed into town, found the VAT office, showed his card at reception, and was directed along a maze of corridors to a huge office whose walls were lined from floor to ceiling, door to door, with box files bulging with tax declarations. It quickly became apparent that the four moustached men behind four gun-metal desks were sorting through the VAT declarations of four years before.
My friend was breathing heavily because he had made it just in time. Like most offices in Italy, this one was open only in the morning since, unlike employees in the private sector, civil servants enjoy a 36-hour week, six mornings, six hours a day. It was now ten to one.
He handed his card to an older, weary, dusty, bespectacled man behind a huge, dusty heap of papers coloured the kind of garish pink and yellow that forms can be. In parenthesis, I find it is curious how colouring forms does nothing to make them more attractive. Rather the colours themselves, become, by association, somewhat frightening: those tissue blues, washed out mauves.
He apologised for the delay but the post had been slow. The man said the date was a formality and of no relevance. He then proceeded to look for the English teacher’s VAT return out of the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, which not only lined the wall, but were arrayed in great barriers of box files between the desks.
When the document was finally found, it emerged that while my friend had been wise perhaps to realise he needed an accountant, he had been unlucky in his choice. For the accountant had made a mistake. In the declaration of four years before, he had mentioned the university income and stated that it was exempt from VAT, but without indicating the code that would explain this exemption. The dusty old man now wanted my friend to tell him which code it was, so that he could write it in the space and the completed form be filed away and forgotten.
In passing, it’s worth pointing out here that had the accountant filled in that space with any code, even a non-existent one, there would most likely have been no problem. For Italian tax inspection appears to be mainly involved in finding contradictory statements within any given declaration. Only very rarely do inspectors go out of their offices to see if the lifestyle of the taxpayer bears any resemblance to his declaration. Thus it is common and frequently repeated wisdom (in the bars in Montecchio for example) that it is far better to make no declaration at all than an incomplete or even minimally incorrect one. A line made all the more attractive by the fact that in this case one doesn’t have to worry with an accountant. When Francesco Pazienza, a millionaire entrepreneur, was arrested in connection with the collapse of the Banco Ambrosiano and the death of director Roberto Calvi (hung under Blackfriars Bridge), it emerged that he had never made a tax declaration in his life, nor ever bothered with a tax code. He had thus never run up against the kind of problems experienced by my friend. And the same could probably be said of one or two people within striking distance of Via Colombare.
But the story that follows will offer a certain justification for that apparently antisocial kind of behaviour.
For my friend now made a terrible mistake. Lulled into a false sense of security by the bland innocuousness of this man with dust in his wrinkles and along the rims of his spectacles and peppering his anyway grey moustache, he said, truthfully, that he didn’t know what code it might be. The man kindly suggested that he go away, consult his accountant, and return with this information inside a week or two. But here the young foreigner was quite criminally ingenuous, a born victim. He didn’t want, he said, to have to return over such a small matter, nor to have to go and consult his accountant. It took him more than half an hour every time he came into town. Surely if he told the old man the nature of the work, he in turn could produce the code; they could then write it down and all would be over.
On the desk there was a little carousel of rubber stamps of all shapes and sizes, some adjustable, some not. The old man tapped the thing with his finger and it began to turn, squeaking slightly. Perhaps this was a warning.
Unheeded. My friend told him the nature of the work. Indeed of all his work. As a person who has nothing to fear from investigation and authority.
The older man became more interested, licked the dust off his lips, said he couldn’t say offhand what code that would be; they would have to go and talk to a colleague.
The maze of passages again, grey carpets, fluorescent light. Indeed, apart from the occasional crucifix hanging under the heating pipes near the ceiling, this could perfectly well be an Inland Revenue office in Wapping or Huntingdon. But it isn’t.
In another gloomy but more private office the colleague is of an entirely different variety. He is young, sanguine, peremptory and dust-free, despite the tomes and papers on his desk.
Such work, he pronounces, after hearing the story, should not have been exempt from VAT. There is no question of there being a code.
But my friend has a document provided for him by the university accountants whom he consulted precisely over this question.
Already he appreciates what a mistake he has made. But it is too late.
A document from the university? The younger man is scornful. No accountant worth his salt would be working at the university, getting only a million and a half a month. Would he? How could they advise him? In any event my friend, as a resident and contributor, is personally responsible for paying his taxes regardless of any advice received — even, the man adds triumphantly, if such incorrect advice were to come from this very office.
The dusty man has stayed to listen. Warming his hands over the radiator he looks out over the window at a building identical to the one the three of them are in, five, six stories, white concrete, regular square windows. In every room all the typewriters are supplied by Olivetti, as they should be.
‘And you’re still working at the university?’ The sanguine inspector has assumed an interrogator’s tone.
Yes.
So that this has been going on for four years?
Yes.
During which time your remuneration has been what?