Pensions and tax are the two issues that are uppermost in the minds of the Italian medical profession today.

Nowadays tax devours everything: salaries and pensions.Hardly a day passes by without reading articles in the press about usurers being arrested and tried for lending money at an exorbitant rate of interest. It then dawns upon us that we live in a State of legalised usurers where, when we cash our pensions or salaries at the end of the month, the tax authorities deprive us of considerable sums at source, at levels abundantly over those permitted by law before becoming usury.Besides direct taxes that are deducted on payment of your salary or pension, if we then add the myriad heavy taxes that are levied from the minute you get up in the morning to when you go back to bed at night, we are left aghast.

If you just stop and think for a moment, it won't take you long to realise that taxes today amount to over 50% a year. Talk about loan sharks!

When the time comes for you to retire, you find the situation hasn't changed in the slightest. Rather, it's worse. The first thing you discover is that the taxes on your pension are taxed. The contributions you paid during your working life where calculated on your gross income which, of course, you never actually pocketed because it was taxed before you even cashed it.

With respect to the pension you should be guaranteed by those contributions, it is taxed again, at the rates you were paying before, as if you'd dodged taxes all your life.

In practice, doctors are faced with a capitalised social security system, which involves no less than paying back in instalments the capital that had been allotted to your own personal account. Now, if that money had been paid into a bank or ordinary insurance company, the money paid back to you in small monthly instalments out of the sum you set aside, after taxes, during your working life, would not be liable to taxes. Your pension is.

Now the tax authorities have set up a system that enables them to check with all the social security institutions, add together the various social security funds and decide on the overall rate that each institution must apply to each individual doctor.

All this is regardless of whether individual doctors are entitled to compensation, deductions or allowances of any kind. Obviously, for that month, our pensionless doctor can go into hibernation and wake up the following month.

Needless to say, social security is governed by the laws of the country, which only demonstrate how heavy the taxes are. Contributions are paid to the social security institution with money from incomes that have already been taxed.

As if that weren't enough, billions of lire are paid out in taxes to the State on the capital belonging to the institutions and the institutions are also bound by a series of restrictions aimed not at making the capital grow but paying a whole range of social obligations that the State piles onto the institutions.

Finally, over the years, the tax authorities have already dipped several times into the money owed to doctors in the form of pensions, during and after the pensions are calculated, but they come back again to tax the fruits of that capital as if it were ordinary income. The time has come for working and retired doctors alike to wake up to the facts and demand a review of the taxes on their pensions.

(traduzione Interpres Sas - Giussano)