The Revenue Agency is speeding up personal income tax refunds to eligible retired members of mutuals, who will be able to request them via a new form ad hoc which the organization has activated since last summer on its website. The document can be completed and presented at any time of the year, but be careful: to fully benefit from the reimbursement, obtaining the reimbursement for the last years not prescribed, it is not necessary to miss the date.
Taxpayers who have not yet requested the refund with any formula – either through a form or with other methods, such as requests for correction of the tax return – will have to request it by 2 February 2026 to obtain the refund in a single solution for the years 2020, 2021 and 2022. In case of delay, 2 February 2027 would be the deadline to jointly request the refund for 2021 and 2022; In the case of the Irpef corresponding to 2022, the deadline is February 2, 2028. From that moment on they will no longer be able to submit the form, even if they will be entitled to a refund of the Irpef in each income campaign.
Interested parties do not have to specify in the form the years for which they request reimbursement of undue income, since it is the Revenue Agency itself that studies the situation of each taxpayer who presents the documentation. For the financial year immediately preceding the refund is automatic: in the tax return of the following year – which will be the one relating to the 2025 income – the refund will be made automatically, as already happened in the income campaign of this year and the last, corresponding to the Irpef of 2023 and 2024.
The right of return has its roots in the very foundations of the welfare state. In the 1970s, with the creation of Social Security, it was established that contributions paid were deductible from income tax. However, this benefit was not extended to workers who contributed to the old mutuals, precursors of Social Security, until its full implementation.
The legislator attempted to resolve the comparative problem by introducing a transitional provision in the Personal Income Tax Law. The amendment granted members of mutual societies the possibility of deducting a percentage of personal income tax in the part of the pension that corresponded to contributions to mutual societies, but in practice the discount was not applied.
In recent years the Court of Cassation has established that the members of the mutual societies had the right to have the transitional rule applied – the decisive ruling was in 2023, in response to an appeal presented by the pensioners of the mutual banking society -, opening the door to an avalanche of claims with the possibility of requesting reimbursements for the previous four years, which is the general period of administrative limitation. The Ministry of Finance has estimated the bill for public coffers at around 6 billion.
Paralysis of procedures
In the spring of last year, the Internal Revenue Service published on its website a form to accelerate declarations for the current year and for non-required years in a single payment. But a few months later, on 22 December 2024, it paralyzed the procedures: it canceled all requests for compensation not paid before 22 December, forcing them to resubmit them, disabled the form and established that interested parties would claim the tax surplus from year to year, within the deadlines set for submitting the tax return.
The Ministry of Finance justified its decision with the difficulty in managing the flood of applications received, but had to backtrack after a few months due to the rejection it generated among interested parties, in the political and trade union world. Last summer it activated a new module and resumed refunds in a single payment.
Due to the regulatory change, the Revenue Agency applies different deadlines to pensioners who requested the refund before December 22, 2024 and who did not receive the benefit. These mutual members will have to submit the new form, since the previous one has been lapsed, but in this case the deadline ends by adding 4 years and 217 days to the date on which the previous application was submitted.
The Revenue Agency itself gives an example: if a refund request was submitted on 10 September 2024, the deadline for submitting the new form would expire on 15 April 2029, 4 years and 217 days later.
