The irregularity notice: reading it, checking it and paying it with a reduced penalty

Laura, a freelance graphic designer in Turin, opens a registered letter from the Agenzia delle Entrate. The automated check of her tax return has found a 3,000 € IRPEF balance that was never paid. The standard penalty would be 750 €, but if she pays within sixty days it falls to one third, 250 €. To choose well, she first needs to know what kind of letter this is and how long she has.

A letter that is not yet an assessment

Its official name is comunicazione di irregolarità, an irregularity notice, but almost everyone in Italy calls it an avviso bonario, a friendly notice. The word is well chosen. The Agenzia is not imposing anything yet: it tells the taxpayer that its figures differ from the return and offers a chance to settle before the file moves to collection.

The Agenzia's own page is explicit. These notices are not genuine tax assessments; they exist so that the taxpayer can put things right and avoid being entered on the collection roll and receiving a payment demand. For the same reason, they cannot be challenged on their own before the tax courts, the Corti di giustizia tributaria.

That changes how you respond. Nobody drafts an appeal against a friendly notice. You check the arithmetic, pay if it is right and ask for a correction if it is not. Litigation, if it ever comes, arrives later and targets the payment demand, the cartella, that follows a notice left unanswered.

Three checks, three kinds of notice

Notices do not all have the same origin. The Agenzia's page on notice types separates three sources, and each carries its own deadline, penalty and way of answering. So the first useful move, as soon as the envelope is open, is to identify which check produced the letter. The heading of the notice usually says so.

The automated check runs on every return filed. A program recomputes taxes, contributions and refunds from the return and from the tax register, and it flags calculation mistakes and payments that were missed, late or short. The legal basis is Article 36-bis of Presidential Decree 600 of 1973 and, for VAT, Article 54-bis of Decree 633 of 1972.

The formal check under Article 36-ter of Decree 600 is selective. The Agenzia picks certain returns on risk criteria and compares deductions, tax credits and withholdings with the taxpayer's paperwork or with data supplied by third parties. A first letter normally asks for the documents; the notice with the outcome follows only if the discrepancy survives.

The third family reports no mistake at all. It concerns income taxed separately, such as severance pay or salary and pension arrears, which were first taxed on a provisional basis. The Agenzia computes the final tax and, if something is still owed, asks for it with no penalty and no interest, provided it is paid within thirty days.

Some notices ask for no money. They report a larger credit, a smaller refund or carried-forward losses that differ from those declared. The Agenzia warns that these deserve careful reading too, so that the same slip is not repeated on the next return. Ignoring them costs nothing today but may cost something next year.

Periodic VAT settlement returns follow their own path. Before any irregularity notice, the Agenzia shows the inconsistencies it has found in a compliance letter, published in the taxpayer's online tax drawer, the Cassetto fiscale, and in the e-invoicing portal. It is an early warning, and it pays to act on it rather than wait for the formal notice.

How it arrives and when the clock starts

Automated-check notices travel by registered mail with return receipt to the tax domicile, or by certified email to the address listed in the INI-PEC public register. If the taxpayer chose this option in the return, the notice goes instead to the intermediary who filed it, through the Entratel channel, and the intermediary must tell the client promptly.

Since 20 November 2024, automated-check and separate-taxation notices also appear in the taxpayer's reserved area, in the section called L'Agenzia scrive inside the Cassetto fiscale, once they have been delivered. An alert in the reserved area and in the IO public-services app announces them, and the same section lets you pay in full or ask for help.

Two periods of the year are protected. Under Article 10 of Legislative Decree 1 of 2024, the Agenzia stops sending notices from 1 to 31 August and from 1 to 31 December, save for urgent cases. Separately, the payment period itself is frozen between 1 August and 4 September, so summer does not eat into it.

The period runs from receipt of the notice, not from the date printed on the letter. For an electronic notice sent to an intermediary, what counts is the day it is made available to that intermediary. Keeping the envelope, the registered-mail receipt or the certified-email delivery record settles any later argument about when the countdown began.

Pay on time and the penalty falls

A taxpayer who accepts the result settles by paying, and speed is rewarded with a lower penalty. After an automated check the Agenzia allows sixty days from receipt of the first notice, or of the final one issued after a correction by the office; the standard penalty for unpaid or late tax is then cut to one third.

After a formal check the period is again sixty days from receipt of the first notice, even if the office later recalculates the amount, and the penalty is cut to two thirds. For separately taxed income there is neither penalty nor interest when payment arrives within thirty days of receipt, or of any later correction by the office.

The starting rate depends on when the breach happened. For breaches committed from 1 September 2024 the standard penalty is 25 per cent, as amended by Legislative Decree 87 of 2024; earlier breaches keep the former rate of 30 per cent. A 2023 return checked today may therefore still carry the older, higher rate.

Where the payment was made but late, the Agenzia points out that the standard penalty is already lower: half, or 12.5 per cent, for a delay of up to ninety days, and one fifteenth per day for a delay of up to fifteen days. The notice sets out the figures it has applied, line by line.

Redo the sum even though the letter already shows it. Checking it reveals whether the breach was dated correctly, whether a payment you made was overlooked, or whether an offset against a credit went unseen. Those are exactly the points the office can fix, and nobody will fix them if the taxpayer pays without looking first.

How to pay

The notice comes with a pre-filled F24 payment form. With that form any taxpayer, VAT-registered or not, can pay at a bank, a post office or a collection agent's desk. If instead you fill in a fresh F24 rather than the pre-filled one, anyone holding a VAT number must pay online and only online.

A faster route exists for automated-check and separate-taxation amounts: a direct debit ordered from the reserved area, in the L'Agenzia scrive section of the Cassetto fiscale. You select the notice and enter your IBAN. This service covers payment in a single sum; anyone who wants to spread the cost follows the instalment route described in the second module.

Paying in full and paying in instalments carry the same reduced penalty, as long as the first instalment is on time. The choice turns on cash flow. Paying now closes the file; spreading the cost eases the outlay but adds interest and the risk of losing the benefit through a late payment. The second module explains how to weigh it.

Minor shortfalls that do not cost you the benefit

Paying a few days late, or a few euros short, does not make everything collapse. Article 15-ter of Presidential Decree 602 of 1973 governs what it calls minor non-compliance. For a delay of no more than seven days, only the penalty and interest on the late sum are entered on the roll; the reduction on the rest survives.

The same applies to an underpayment, provided the missing part does not exceed 3 per cent and, in any case, 10,000 euros. Only the unpaid fraction, with penalty and interest calculated on it, goes onto the roll. Beyond those thresholds the slip stops being minor and the consequences change sharply.

Even the roll entry for a minor shortfall can be avoided. The taxpayer uses voluntary correction, the ravvedimento, within ninety days of the due date, paying the missing fraction, the reduced penalties and statutory interest. For separately taxed income the Agenzia allows the same fix for late payment of the tax requested, again within ninety days.

These correction payments have dedicated tax codes, created by Resolution 132/E of 29 December 2011: for the automated check, 8929 for the penalty and 1980 for interest; for the formal check, 8933 and 1983. Reusing the codes of the original notice instead of these is one of the most common slips.