Italy is going to remove the Esterometro obligation as of January 2022. Consequently, foreign transactions (including intra-community ones) will have to be reported in SdI (Sistema di Interscambio).
Background
Italy has always been considered a country with complex and demanding VAT compliance requirements. The first detailed Italian transactional reporting was called Spesometro. In that report, taxpayers were obliged to provide data about their sales and purchase invoices.
In 2019 SdI was introduced. This was one of very first real-time reporting obligations in Europe. SdI follows so-called clearance model, meaning that issued invoices needed to be pre-approved by the tax authorities (Agenzia Entrate) before they could be sent to customers. Once the SDL came into force, the Spesometro obligation was abolished.
However, foreign invoices were initially not covered by SdI. Therefore, the Esterometro report was introduced. Esterometro was very similar to Spesometro, but exclusively deal with foreign invoices.
Finally, in 2021, Fattura 1.6.1. was introduced. Fattura describes the technical XML structure and the content of the invoices transmitted through SdI. The new version of Fattura contains a number of relevant fields that enable foreign invoice reporting. Here is a link (link to be pasted) to our detailed article about Fattura 1.6.1. (and FatturaPA 1.3.1 for B2G transactions).
Taxpayers who decided to transmit their foreign invoices through SdI in 2021 were already exempt from quarterly Esterometro obligations in 2021. However, as of January 2022 all taxpayers will need to submit all foreign invoices through SdI system.
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