Tax Credit Applications Management

In July 2018, the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities (MiBAC) needed to quickly develop an IT system that would enable it to comply with Legislative Decree 215/2018, which contains provisions on tax credits for commercial operators in the retail book sales sector. 

By the end of September, any commercial activity in the retail book sales sector had to be able to register on the system and submit a tax credit application, attaching a detailed profile of relevant economic and operational data.

The system was required to verify the formal validity of the applications by checking the digital signature and querying the national Business Register's IT systems.

Additionally, by the end of October, the system had to support the entire application evaluation process, generate statistics, allocate funds according to a complex tiered algorithm, and record the tax credit granted to each beneficiary in the national state aid registry, while verifying any potential exceedance of the established limits.

Given the extremely tight deadlines, Livebase was selected as the reference technology to implement the system. The “Bookstores Tax Credit” went operational at the end of September 2018, allowing MiBAC to receive tax credit applications from over a thousand of bookstores operators across Italy, along with a wide range of high-quality data related to their business and each of their sales points.

In addition to validating the digital signatures of the applicants, the system interfaced with InfoCamere (to verify the consistency of the declared data with the Chamber of Commerce records), with the National State Aid Registry  (to check the eligibility of each operator to receive additional aid and to record such aid if granted), and with the Italian Revenue Agency (to allow operators to deduct the granted tax credit).

For the 2018 fiscal year, the algorithm implemented in the system, based on the provisions of the Legislative Decree 215/2018, distributed a total of 4 million euros in tax credits to approximately 800 of the 1,200 applications received, constantly providing MiBAC officials with full control over the process through the generation of automatic alerts, statistics, and simulations.