In Italy, It’s No Longer Cool To Be a Tax Cheat

In Italy it’s no longer much fun to drive a Lamborghini or a Ferrari. That’s because the police are now regularly stopping these sleek cars and forcing their drivers to show if they’ve paid income taxes. Surprise, surprise, many of these cool cat drivers have been opting to sell the sports cars to avoid this scrutiny.

An ABC News story said that Italy’s tax strapped government is working hard on changing the country’s attitude about paying taxes.  TV ads are running that depict tax cheats as parasites, people sucking the life out of the rest of the honest citizens.

There are so many used Ferraris on the market that prices have dropped about 20 percent!. But there has been a violent backlist, with more than 250 attacks on tax offices, including throwing molotov cocktails into the buildings. Many Italians, like a plumber in Pescara, try registering the cars in their mother’s names.

“The culture of Italians is changing,” Attilio Befera, the Italian tax agency’s director, told reporters recently. “Fiscal evasion is seen as a bad thing for everyone, not a cunning habit anymore.”