The Rai license fee returns from January, no changes: it remains in the bill

From January the Rai license fee will return to the bill. After the November and December break, in fact, the 90 euros spread over 10 months will return to be included in the electricity bill. A solution that does not seem to be changed given that the Government is not willing to intervene by bringing the rent off the bills despite the pressure coming from Brussels.

Exemption cases are foreseen for those who declare that in none of the homes where the electricity user is activated has a TV set, either its own or belonging to a member of the registry family. You need a substitute declaration with a specific form that can be downloaded from the Revenue Agency website. The exemption is also provided for “citizens who have reached the age of 75, with an annual income of their own and that of their spouse not exceeding a total of 8,000 euros and without cohabitants who have their own income (except for domestic collaborators, maids and carers)” . The benefit “is valid for the entire year if the 75th birthday is completed by January 31st of the same year. If the 75th birthday took place from February 1st to July 31st of the year, the benefit is due for the second semester “. Foreign diplomats and military personnel are also exempted from paying the TV license fee “22 due to international conventions”. widespread tax evasion for public TV. Although the Government has pledged on the one hand to increase transparency in the electricity bill and on the other to eliminate, as required by the EU, the request for suppliers to collect “charges unrelated to the energy sector”, i.e. connected to the energy sector, the Government seems to have put a stone on the issue.

In 2020, the revenue from the rent exceeded 1.72 billion euros with ordinary rent revenues for 1 , 64 billion. In the first half of 2021, based on the data published in the published half-year financial statements, for ordinary rents from private users, revenues settled at 857.6 million, up by 45.4 million compared to the half-year 2020, within total rental income of 923 million (+53.7 million). For fees from special users (from production activities), the March “support” Decree established “the full exemption from the payment for the year 2021 of the special radio and television subscription fee for accommodation facilities as well as for the administration and consumption of beverages in public places or places open to the public, including similar activities carried out by third sector entities; the allocation of a sum equal to 83 million Euros in order to recognize to the interested parties a tax credit equal to 100% of the possible payment of the fee that occurred before the entry into force of the decree, or to arrange the transfer in favor of RAI of the sums corresponding to the lower revenues requested by the Company “.

As the same RAI managers have stated several times, however, against the annual amount of 90 euros, Viale Mazzini receives 75.4 euros . In fact, the transfer of the fee does not take place directly from the bill to Rai, but passes through the Revenue Agency and then from this to the public television coffers. And the 90 euros include the contribution to the Publishing Fund headed by the Prime Minister and that for local antennas, headed by Mise. Hence, the difference that ends up on public TV compared to the amount collected in the bill. Even the CEO Carlo Fuortes of Rai during a hearing in the Supervisory Authority acknowledged that with the passage of the fee in the bill “the number of payers has increased from 15 million to 21-22 million” and “the evasion rate has dropped from 27 per cent to 5 per cent, and currently it is around 3 per cent “.

For the top management of Viale Mazzini, removing the fee from the bill would mean putting at risk what little certainty about the income that in a condition such as the current one, with a net financial position in the red of 604 million at the end of 2020 (and -317.3 million in the half year), it would represent too great a risk for the keeping of public TV accounts.