Lo "Stato del lavori" della Commissione Cosciani, cinquant'anni dopo: osservazioni sugli studi per la riforma del sistema fiscale

This paper aims to make a few comments on two cycles of studies for the "global" reform of the Italian tax system. Fifty years have passed since the publication of the final Report of the “Commission for the Study of the tax reform”, i.e. the synthesis of eight months of work that the Commission - under the guidance of his vice president, Cesare Cosciani – carried on from the date of the settlement, the September 28, 1962, until the shutdown, in view of the renewal of the Government. The draft tax reform of the Sixties represents the culmination of a cycle of studies, which began during the work of the Constituent Assembly and then continued in stages, with stops and starts, until the enabling act of 1971 and related legislation implementation. A project, crowned by the political success, which marks the entrance of the Italian tax system in the dimension of modernity. The primary objective of the reform is the search for full consonance between the tax system and the principles of the Constitution. This theoretical design of the reform may be found only partially in the structure of the new tax system: the original project was changed, during the transition from Cosciani Commission, to the subsequent Visentini Commission, and, finally, to the implementation phase. Within a few years, supplementary and amending interventions stratify on the rational architecture of the reformed system, causing the degeneration of the reform plan and the development of a legal labyrinth. In 1994 – at exactly thirty years since the publication of the final Report of the Cosciani Commission – is made public the “White Paper on tax reform”, which summarizes a long cycle of studies and the work of an informal Commission, composed of economists and lawyers. The “White Paper” is an attempt to reform the taxation of a nation-state since the advent of the world economy, from a philosophical reflection on the future society, but remains in the academic dimension. The 2003 tax reform plays the paradigm of the “White Paper”, but in a more pragmatic way. Its enabling law is implemented only in part.