Dear Legislator,
I would like to put before you a reflection born not of an abstract principle but of the everyday life of someone trying to follow the rules. Requirements keep increasing: we must report, submit, certify, retain and check. Each step can have a reason when it protects legality, transparency and fairness. What troubles me is the next step: citizens are asked not only to do their part, but to keep proof that they have done it and, sometimes, to supervise people and offices over which they have no control.
A report the State has already received
Consider someone offering an apartment for short stays. Guests’ details are sent to the Italian State Police through its Alloggiati Web portal. The public system records the report and generates a receipt. Under the current rules, however, the operator must download that receipt and keep it for five years; the portal makes it available for download only for a limited period. I am not suggesting that anyone ignore this obligation. I am asking whether it is right for proof of an act received by a public system to depend primarily on the private archive of the person who performed it.
If the public administration received the report, why must the citizen prove, years later, that the public administration received it?
It is like handing a document to a public counter and being told: “Keep the receipt safe, because one day we might ask you to prove that you gave it to us.” I understand that personal data, security and retention periods place limits on public archives. That is precisely why I propose a record of compliance that can be accessed and verified for the prescribed period, without making citizens the sole keepers of the system’s memory.
Money the professional never received
A second example is Italian withholding tax. For simplicity, leaving aside VAT and other items, imagine a gross fee of 1,000 euros: the client, acting as withholding agent, pays 800 euros to the professional and withholds 200 euros intended for the tax authority. Those 200 euros never came into the professional’s possession. The client withheld them, and it is the client who must remit them.
The Joint Divisions of Italy’s Court of Cassation have clarified that if a withholding was actually made but the withholding agent failed to remit it, the payee is not jointly required to pay the sum a second time. A practical difficulty remains: if the certificate is missing or incorrect, the professional may have to use invoices, bank records and other documents to show that the withholding really took place. Case law allows evidence equivalent to the certificate, but gathering and presenting it is still a burden.
Why should someone who never had that money have to prove what another party should have certified and paid?
Ten everyday situations
These are not isolated cases. The situations below are governed by different rules, and they do not all automatically create legal liability for citizens. They do show how often people are asked to check or reconstruct a step taken elsewhere.
- Selling a car. After signing the documents and handing over the vehicle, a seller may still need to check that the transfer has been entered in Italy’s public vehicle register. If it has not, the seller may receive demands or objections concerning a vehicle no longer in their possession. The Automobile Club of Italy recommends checking.
- Entrusting a tax return to an intermediary. We hire a professional precisely because tax matters are complex. Yet it remains important to check the outcome of the filing and obtain the receipt: engaging an intermediary does not, by itself, make every problem disappear for the taxpayer.
- Electronic submissions. A document is sent through a public portal, but its receipt is downloaded and kept in case the sender must later demonstrate what the system recorded.
- Certified email, or PEC. The system generates evidence of acceptance and delivery. In practice, the sender archives the message, receipts and attachments so they can be produced when needed.
- Payments to a public authority. Even when an electronic system processes the payment, we prudently keep the receipt in case an office cannot immediately reconstruct it.
- Documents the State already holds. At times one office asks citizens for information available from another authority, making them intermediaries between the two.
- Inheritance, property and local taxes. Deeds that have been registered or filed may need to be shown again to clarify a position with a different public body.
- Residence and registry changes. After a municipality records a change, citizens may still feel they have to check whether it has been correctly reflected in later procedures.
- Fines and taxes linked to a situation that has ended. A person may need to prove that, on the date in question, they were no longer the owner, resident or responsible party, even though a public record already shows the change.
- Delegating to a professional. Accountants, advisers and tax-assistance centres handle obligations many citizens could not manage alone. Yet the practical boundary between the intermediary’s duty and the client’s duty to check is not always clear.
I am not asking for proof to disappear: I am asking each party to keep its own
The pattern I see is this: complying is not enough; we must keep proof of compliance. Assigning a task to an authorised person is not enough; we must verify that they carried it out. The existence of information in a public database is not enough; we must be ready to identify its location or produce it again.
Italian law already contains a sensible principle. Article 43 of Presidential Decree 445/2000 provides that public authorities obtain, on their own initiative and with the necessary identifying information, data and documents already held by public administrations, or accept the prescribed substitute declarations. This is not a promise that every document can move automatically and without limits: privacy rules and proper identification of the data still matter. But the general principle is clear.
The citizen should not have to be the public administration’s courier.
In practice, however, citizens too often still act as the link between offices, archives and procedures that ought to communicate directly with one another.
Four principles to put into practice
Each person answers for what they can control
When citizens have correctly completed their part, a later failure by another actor should not automatically become their fault. We must identify precisely who had the power to act at each stage.
The State does not ask again for what it already holds
If an authority has a document, or can lawfully obtain it from another authority, it should do so. Citizens may be asked for the details needed to locate it, not to carry it from one public archive to another.
A public system keeps the evidence it generates
When a portal records a submission, that record should provide verifiable proof of compliance, with access rules, retention periods and safeguards compatible with security and privacy. Citizens may keep a copy for their own peace of mind; that copy should not be their only defence.
Delegation has a real meaning
If the law permits or requires the use of a professional intermediary, it must clearly separate the responsibility of the person who gives the assignment from that of the person who performs it. Otherwise the paradox is plain: I pay someone to handle a duty I cannot manage myself, but then I have to check whether the person I paid to check has checked properly. Delegation then loses much of its meaning.
The total burden nobody sees
One receipt to keep. One report to submit. One certificate to check. One deadline to remember. One password to manage. One portal to log into. One declaration to download. One certified email to archive. Taken separately, each may seem reasonable. But citizens do not live through one requirement at a time: they live through all of them together. It is the sum of these small duties that becomes bureaucracy.
Before creating another duty, I would therefore ask you to consider not one question but five:
- Is this requirement truly useful?
- Who already holds the information?
- Who actually controls the act that must be performed?
- Why must anything more be asked of the citizen?
- Where the law permits it, can public systems exchange the information directly?
Digitising is not enough
Technology now makes possible checks that were once difficult. A system can attest when a document was submitted, verify a payment, consult a register or reconstruct who held a title on a given date. Of course, not every archive is connected, not every datum can be accessed for every purpose, and no information should be kept without limit. That is precisely why we need clear rules on interoperability, security, retention and responsibility.
Digitisation should not stop at converting a paper form into an online form: that merely changes how it is completed. Real simplification eliminates the form when the authority already has the necessary information and can lawfully use it. It does not merely turn a paper receipt into a PDF; it makes it possible to verify, at its source and with proper legal weight, the evidence generated by the system itself.
What I am asking of you
No citizen should have to prove to a public authority a fact that the authority can already lawfully verify in its own systems.
No citizen should be held responsible for another party’s failure when they have correctly done everything within their own power.
I am not asking for checks to be abolished or for anyone to evade their responsibilities. I am asking that the burden of proof and the duty of oversight follow the real ability to act. This would be less a technological revolution than a revolution in common sense.
A modern society should not require citizens to be taxpayers, archivists, investigators, supervisors and guarantors against other people’s mistakes all at once. It should ask them to follow the rules. And when they have done so, the State should also take responsibility for remembering it.
Respectfully,
Salvatore Mosaico
Essential sources
For the legal context and examples: the decree on Alloggiati Web and State Police guidance on receipts; Court of Cassation, Joint Divisions no. 10378/2019; Automobile Club of Italy, advice for sellers; Presidential Decree 445/2000, art. 43; AgID, certified email.