The declaration of intent, the supplier's duties and the penalties

A Padua wholesaler receives a letter from a customer announcing tax-free purchases and invoices 50,000 € without VAT. It never checks whether the declaration was actually sent to the Revenue Agency. It was not. On top of the 11,000 € of VAT it should have charged, it faces a penalty of seventy per cent, that is 7,700 €.

From paper letter to electronic filing

The ceiling does not work by itself. For a supplier to invoice without VAT, the exporter has to tell it that it intends to use the option. For decades that intention was expressed in a letter, the lettera d'intento, handed to the supplier. The channel has since changed, as the Revenue Agency's page states.

For transactions carried out from 1 January 2020, regular exporters who intend to buy or import without VAT must send the declaration of intent electronically to the Agency. They can file it themselves, if they are enabled on Entratel or Fisconline, or through authorised intermediaries.

The legal basis is letter c) of article 1 of Decree-Law 746 of 1983. The declaration follows the form approved by a decision of the Agency's director and is sent electronically. The Agency issues an electronic receipt showing the receipt reference, the protocol number, which becomes the declaration's identifier.

The same provision states that one declaration may cover several transactions. The exporter does not need to send one per invoice: it can send one for a given supplier and for an amount that covers the planned purchases, within the ceiling available. The Agency publishes the form and its instructions in the relevant section.

The form in use is the one that the Agency's page lists for use from 2 March 2020, together with its instructions. This course identifies them and points to that page without reproducing the boxes line by line: it is the form itself, not a summary, that governs.

What the supplier must do

On the other side is the supplier, which gives up charging tax at its customer's request. The law gives it two tasks. The first concerns the invoice: the details of the declaration's receipt number must appear on every invoice issued on the basis of it, as letter c) of article 1 provides.

Instead of the tax, the invoice also carries the note that paragraph 6 of article 21 of the VAT decree requires for non-taxable supplies under article 8, namely «operazione non imponibile», optionally citing the provision. Without the receipt number and the note, the invoice does not document a sale to a regular exporter.

The second task is a check made in advance. Article 7, paragraph 4-bis, of Legislative Decree 471 of 1997 penalises a supplier who sells without VAT under article 8, letter c), without first confirming online that the declaration has been filed with the Agency. The customer's letter alone is not enough.

The check is made with the service for verifying receipt of declarations of intent, which the Agency's page lists among its related links. One check per declaration received, carried out before the first invoice and kept on file, is a supplier's simplest defence if it is ever audited.

For imports, customs plays the supplier's role. The importer shows the receipt number in the customs declaration, and the Revenue Agency makes its database of declarations of intent available to the Customs and Monopolies Agency. The trader therefore does not need to hand in paper copies of the declaration and the receipt at customs.

• Obtain the details of the declaration of intent from the customer
• Check online that the declaration has been filed with the Agency
• Issue the invoice without tax, marked «operazione non imponibile»
• Show the declaration's receipt number on the invoice
• Stay within the amount stated in the declaration received

The last step in the example matters as much as the first. The declaration states an amount, and a supplier invoicing tax-free beyond it no longer has a declaration covering the excess. For that excess, it is in the same position as a supplier invoicing with no declaration at all, with the consequences set out in paragraph 3.

Penalties and who pays them

The penalty system shares the risks between exporter and supplier, and both should understand it before signing or accepting a declaration. The rules are in article 7 of Legislative Decree 471 of 1997, which deals with export-related breaches, in the version read for this course.

Paragraph 3 targets anyone who makes supplies without charging tax when there is no declaration of intent: the penalty is seventy per cent of the tax, and the tax itself remains payable. That is the Padua wholesaler's situation, having invoiced without VAT on the strength of a declaration that was never filed.

The same paragraph protects a careful supplier in one specific case. If the declaration was issued without the conditions the law requires, only the buyers, customers and importers who issued it are liable for the unpaid tax. The risk of an unfounded declaration falls on whoever signs it.

Paragraph 4 is aimed at the exporter. It applies the same penalty to anyone who, without meeting the conditions, tells the other party or customs that it wishes to buy without tax, and to anyone who uses the option beyond the permitted limit. Exceeding the ceiling is thus a breach by the buyer, not by the seller.

The same paragraph softens the rule in one case. If the limit is exceeded because the buyer or agent failed to export, where the law provides for this, the penalty is halved. It does not apply at all if the tax is paid within thirty days of the export deadline, after the invoice has been corrected.

These percentages carry a caveat of their own. In the Gazette, the 1997 penalties decree now appears repealed by the consolidated penalties code, Legislative Decree 173/2024 as reworded by Decree-Law 200/2025. Our figures come from article 7 as it stood before that repeal; when the new code starts to apply was not checked.

An example shows how the reduction works. An exporter buys 10,000 € of goods without VAT that its own customer was supposed to export, and the export never happens. The tax avoided is 2,200 € at the standard rate.

The penalty, half of seventy per cent, comes to 770 €. It does not apply at all if the 2,200 € is paid within the thirty days allowed, after correcting the invoice. Putting things right in time then costs only the tax that should have been paid from the start.

The same article contains parallel rules for another option, the one in article 8-bis of the VAT decree, which concerns shipping. Paragraphs 3-bis, 3-ter and 4-ter apply the penalty in paragraph 3 to it. Businesses outside that sector can ignore them, but it helps to know they exist so as not to confuse them with the regular exporter rules.

The anti-fraud safeguard and using the ceiling

A tool that saves its user VAT also lends itself to abuse, and the law knows it. The Agency's legislation page lists a decision of 28 October 2021 implementing an anti-fraud safeguard introduced by the 2021 budget law.

According to the title of that decision, its operating arrangements concern in particular the cancellation of declarations of intent already issued and the blocking of new ones. Its detailed content was not read for this course; what matters to a supplier is the practical consequence, namely that a declaration valid yesterday may not be valid today.

A useful habit follows. The online check is not something to do once, when the declaration arrives. Repeating it when supplies continue over time, or when something changes in the relationship with the customer, lowers the risk of invoicing without VAT on a declaration cancelled in the meantime.

For the exporter, the useful habit is a ceiling log. For each supplier it records the amount of the declarations sent and the purchases actually invoiced without VAT, and keeps the remaining balance up to date. A fixed ceiling is used up over the year; a rolling one is recalculated every month.

The log also helps keep two figures apart: the value of the declarations and the ceiling actually used. One supplier may never reach the amount its declaration states, while another uses it up in a few months. What counts under paragraph 4 is the tax-free purchases actually made.

For the exporter, a cancellation has knock-on effects. Suppliers running the check will no longer find a valid declaration and will go back to charging VAT, and tax-free purchases already planned will have to be revisited. Keeping the conditions for the ceiling in order is therefore also a way of keeping supplies flowing.

The supplier, for its part, has no means of judging whether the customer really passes the ten per cent test. The law does not ask it to: it asks the supplier to confirm online that the declaration was filed and to show its receipt number on the invoice. The rest is the responsibility of whoever makes the declaration.

A rule that changes its numbering in 2027

Article 1 of Decree-Law 746, too, shows in the version after the one cited nothing but its repeal by Legislative Decree 10 of 2026. The procedures described in this module apply to transactions in 2026; from 1 January 2027 they must be read again in the consolidated VAT code.

The Agency's pages on the declaration of intent, by contrast, are operational pages with their own update dates. The main page was last updated on 10 February 2022. Anyone reading them after 2026 should check that the form listed is still the one in use.