My friend tells him. The other man’s fingers are extraordinarily rapid on the keyboard of a calculator. ‘You have evaded VAT for around nine million Lire,’ he says.
But as the English teacher gasps, makes to protest, the inspector has suddenly become friendly. ‘However, we should see this document you mentioned and your contract before we go into detail. Why don’t you bring them in?’
He smiles, goes to pick up his coat. Is it because he’s realised that it is time for him to go home for lunch? Or is there some other reason.
‘When?’
‘Oh, when you like. But don’t forget.’
Leaving the building, my friend reflects that this kind of vagueness is more disconcerting than comforting. As was the unexpectedly pally smile on the young man’s previously severe face. Extremely anxious as he is, he wants the matter settled at once, not left hanging over his head. And so he rushes things. When perhaps he might have been wiser to do what Orietta would no doubt have advised: had his blood pressure checked, waited till it had fallen.
In any event, he calls his accountant immediately, from a phone box outside the tax office, and tells him the story. At no point does the accountant apologise for his original mistake. If his client wishes, he says, he will go and talk to the tax office about it himself, but perhaps before he does so, it would be better if my friend got the document in question and the contract, took it to the inspectors, stressed his ingenuousness and insisted on his good faith. He has not, after all, pocketed any money in VAT and then avoided paying it to the state, as perhaps a shopkeeper might. He has merely omitted to charge the client VAT on top of the regular price, always assuming he was in fact supposed to do so. In this way he has not profited from the situation at all. Nor will the state have lost through the university’s having detracted from their own VAT payments any monies supposedly paid to him.
My friend, however, is losing his nerve. He positively flaunts his anxiety by returning to the tax office with his documents the very next day. First there’s the dusty man again, then the sanguine man, the one drily polite, apologetic, apparently innocuous, the other tougher, dismissive, immediately assuming the attitude of one who is fed up of hearing cock-and-bull stories.
Allora?
Here is the document.
The younger man looks at it; the older is window-gazing again. The document quotes three or four different laws, sections, paragraphs, amendments — convincing pomposity.
‘Incompetenti’ is the comment, and the VAT man opens a tome on his desk, finds a page, begins to read rapidly out loud from one of the laws cited. My friend, who is actually a dab hand at translating complex commercial insurance documents, can’t quite follow it. Somehow it all depends on whether his non-university jobs are continuativi (regular) or saltuari (occasional). He earns, he says, about ten million a year from translations from a variety of clients, some new, some old, but he would be hard-pressed to say if this added up to continuativo or saltuario. The words surely require more precise definition.
The sanguine man undergoes one of his mistifying changes of behaviour. He smiles, he is relaxed. ‘Sì, sì, sono d’accordo,’ he agrees. And adds: ‘Five in ten people would probably feel you were in the right.’
‘After all, given that I’ve made nothing out of it, no one can deny I’m in good faith.’
‘D’accordo, d’accordo.’
The dusty man turns from the window to watch. My friend is smiling, seeing light at the end of the tunnel. The accountant seems to have advised him well.
Then the younger man lifts a hand to his face, touches his cheek, and says very politely: ‘Though good faith is no defence under law, only a mitigating circumstance.’
‘But …’
‘And my interpretation remains, that you should have been paying VAT, that you have evaded VAT for a sum of approximately nine million Lire, and that you are thus subject to repayment of that sum, plus further payment of a fine.’
Flabbergasted, my friend can barely get out: ‘How much?’
‘Fines are usually equal to the amount evaded. A further nine million, with some reduction if you pay immediately, of course.’
A total of eighteen million Lire, or about eight thousand pounds. With his back to the window now the older man doesn’t bat a dusty eyelid.
‘But only a moment ago you said interpretation could go either way.’
‘Naturally you could appeal against this and the judgement could indeed go either way. Which would clarify the law most usefully in situations of this kind. In the meantime you would be obliged to pay 33 per cent of monies due as a first instalment. You would also lose any possible reduction for immediate payment.’
My friend and the inspector are of about the same age and build. They stare at each other across the desk. One in disbelief, the other almost quizzical. And at last my friend plays his first smart move, even though his original idea is merely to gain time. He explains that some of his colleagues have recently fought and won a case to be recognised as employees of the university, not free-lance workers, this means that the job cannot be considered as subject to VAT. And recognition was retrospective. It would cover this period.
The sanguine man caresses his chin, narrows his eyes. He reminds my friend that in Italy the decision of a court does not establish precedence. It merely offers one interpretation of the existing law. The verdict in favour of his colleagues, if such a verdict exists, thus refers exclusively to those who fought the case, not to him. A second judge could perfectly well decide differently in his case. His status thus remains the same, and as far as he, the inspector, is concerned VAT has been evaded to the tune of 9 million. As an employee of the government he has a duty to collect evaded taxes and to punish those who evade them.
For the first time my friend lies, and this is another step forward. ‘But I have begun my own case too,’ he says. He is trembling.
‘Ah?’
‘So at present, in a way, everything is sub iudice.’
There is a long hard pause, much eye contact. The dusty man pouts, coughs drily. Finally the younger inspector politely invites my friend to come back once again, this time with a copy both of the sentence of the case won by his colleagues and of his lawyer’s presentation of his own case to the Tribunale del Lavoro.
Which of course he hasn’t got. Looking back at the building as he leaves, my friend remembers The Castle, the courtrooms of The Trial. Immediately, he phones his accountant. The avuncular man, in yet another cluttered office complete with crucifix, is kind and genuinely concerned. He hadn’t initially wanted to go and speak to the tax people personally since, ‘Finora io e te abbiamo sempre collaborato in modo amichevole’: i.e., ‘So far you have paid me under the table and I haven’t given you a receipt for my services or in any way indicated in my books that you are a client of mine.’ However, at this point he agrees it is time he went to talk to these people. Yes, he knows who it must be.
A nail-biting week. During which, to pass the time, and then, because, once there’s an itch you have to scratch it, my friend goes to the university accounts office and again enquires, as if merely to reassure himself, about his tax position. Again he hears, as he did four years ago, that there is no need for him to pay VAT on his university income. He then tells the accountant, a forty-year-old man with the dress style of someone determined to stay young, an expensive mixture of Armani, Gianfranco Ferrè and Benetton, that the VAT office thinks otherwise and is at this very moment asking him to pay a heavy fine. To which the other man replies with great promptness that he can in no way be held responsible for the advice he gives. A brief slanging match follows, since this is one person, my friend feels, he can give a piece of his very worried mind to with impunity. As always, Christ looks on from his own particular cross. Plastic in this case.