The Citizenship Income feeding trough officially ended on December 31, 2023, but years later its ghost continues to weigh on the pockets of Italian taxpayers.
Conceived as a measure to combat poverty for a country with 5.7 million people in absolute poverty, the flagship reform of the Five Star Movement showed predictable but devastating structural flaws, which compromised its effectiveness turning it into a black hole for public finances. A failure not only political but economic, whose real cost we continue to pay day after day while Conte and his team give us finance lessons.
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The dimensions of this accounting disaster are revealed by the Inps data relating to the 2025 general report. The Institute’s budget shows an unresolved black hole: about 1.4 billion euros are still missing related to undue payments made between 2021 and 2024. Never recovered and perhaps unrecoverable. An enormous figure compared to the total expenditure of the measure, which over the years has drained about 34.6 billion of public resources, reaching its peak in 2021 with 8.8 billion.
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The most paradoxical aspect lies in the comparison with the new political course. The Meloni government replaced the Five Star income with the Inclusion Allowance (Adi), which in 2025 absorbed 5.6 billion euros. The transition to the new subsidy guaranteed the State coffers an estimated annual saving of about 1.4 billion. However, this saving is canceled out by the hole left by the failure to recover the old sums unduly received. But how was it possible to accumulate such a shortfall? According to the Court of Auditors, the main cause is the culpable absence of timely controls. The RdC came into effect in April 2019 with the disbursement of subsidies based on simple self-certifications, but the management of recoveries started only in 2021. The preventive anti-fraud system, launched at the end of 2020, became fully operational only in June 2022 with territorial guidelines. This time gap allowed the proliferation of frauds, false declarations, and irregular positions.
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Even Inps’s collection capacity proved inadequate: out of over 967.8 million of undue payments ascertained in the three-year period 2021-2023, the institute recovered just 141.3 million. This means that the State managed to get back only 1.40 euros for every 10 unjustly paid. Irregularities range from lack of residence requirements to exceeding the Isee threshold, to undeclared work activities or omission of foreign accounts and corporate participations.
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And to think that this rule, with which the Five Star Movement was supposed to “abolish poverty,” in their mind should have “created a multiplier” and “generated GDP.” The irony? To those 1.4 billion wasted must be added 225 million for the cost of the navigators, that is those who were supposed to find jobs for people. Instead, they ended up losing theirs too.
