(ANSA) - Palermo, February 21 - Police were conducting a
large-scale tax-evasion sweep in Palermo on Tuesday after
announcing that a similar crackdown in Trento found merchants
had dodged 17% of what they owed.
Dozens of officers in the Sicilian capital were performing
random checks on shopkeepers after a police report showed
merchants in the northern Trentino province were delinquent on a
large range of taxes.
Of 250 employees questioned, roughly 30 were paid under the
Of 350 transactions that police reviewed, 60 were either
reported incorrectly or not declared at all.
Police also randomly stopped luxury vehicles in the Alpine
region over the weekend and were verifying owners' tax records.
Italian President Giorgio Napolitano on Tuesday called tax
evasion "a terrible scourge" that is partly responsible for "the
explosion of our debt".
With cash needed to balance the budget by 2013 and
emerge from the debt crisis, Premier Mario Monti has launched a
drive against tax cheats, who he recently said "are giving
poisoned bread to their children".
The campaign has featured a number of headline-grabbing
operations among rich tourists in Cortina d'Ampezzo and the
Ligurian Riviera, shoppers at exclusive stores in Rome and
nightclub owners in Milan.
Italy's internal revenue agency has said that it will ramp
up the pressure further by introducing a new system to find
evaders by cross-checking incomes and spending by the end of
The tax agency last year estimated that around 120 billion
euros' worth of undeclared business was done on the Italian
underground economy each year.