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Comment by contriban | Hacker News Reader

Can confirm. My parents own a restaurant in Italy and if the authorities come it’s a € 2000/3000 fine for sure.

For a small seasonal business that’s substantial.

For example if you give a receipt and the customer misplaces it on the way out and can’t find anymore, you’re liable for tax evasion. Never mind that the POS has its own registry they can check. For the authorities, “you didn’t give a receipt, so they can’t tax you.”

When the restaurant was opened about 20 years ago, all sorts of departments came to check it out and suggest whatever ridiculous change.

Food safety in Italy however is probably among the best in the world due to this.

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> For the authorities, “you didn’t give a receipt, so they can’t tax you.”

Honest question: is this actually the law, or a tactic of an official seeking a bribe?

There is a very similar situation in Germany. The reason behind this is that you can use older POS systems for tax fraud (I never fully understood the details), which apparently was quite a thing amongst smaller businesses. The tax authorities then demanded a perfect chain of paper records (apparently the paper recipe contains some kind of a reference to earlier transactions). Bizarrely, they actually asked customers to keep these receipts which pretty much no one really did, but it was a public topic for a couple of weeks.

German source:

https://www.bundesfinanzministerium.de/Content/DE/FAQ/2020-0...

"It uses blockchain" eyeroll

On old POS systems you can just roll back the transactions and put the cash in your pocket, as if it never happened…

In Italy, that’s law because there used to be/is (don’t know which is true) a culture where, some/many cafes and restaurants let some/many visitors pay ‘under the table’, dodging VAT taxes.

That law requires shipowners to give a receipt and customers to keep it. Customers can be fined if, a few meters outside the shop, a policeman asks them to show their receipt, and the policeman has evidence they bought something or some service (https://www.accountingbolla.com/blog/sales-tax-in-italy-iva)

In Poland the tax office clerks just go shopping and if they are not offered a receipt, the store will be heavily fined. The customer is not liable, but the shop is, so pretty much everyone will offer you a receipt immediately.

I’m not really familiar with the matter but this year they started requiring immediate reporting from the POS as far as I know. That should tell you how serious they are about receipts in Italy (because there is/was widespread fraud.)

This is the same on Germany, maybe it's an EU thing

It's the law

The number of times restaurants tried to defraud me makes me happy that authorities are getting stricter. Waiters make "errors" on the handwritten receipt that somehow are always in the restaurants favor, or they "forget" a 20€ bill when giving you change.

Even with the new EU laws regarding receipt, it's surprising how often you are told that you can't pay by card because the machine is broken, or that the waiter "accidentally" hands you the wrong kind of receipt (they hand you an order summary, which was not yet finalized and is not an official invoice, and after you pay they cancel everything so that the payment is not recorded).

Just curious, mind messaging me the restaurant? I'm in the US but my family is from Milano and have had a family shop for decades. Hoping to visit again soon!

Nice try, Italian tax police /s

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