Abstract
With judgment n. 262/2020, the Constitutional Court ruled that the prohibition of deducting the IMU tax (municipal property tax) on business assets in the calculation of corporate income tax base (and, more generally, of business income) is unconstitutional with respect to 2012. According to the Court, once the choice has been made to take as a basis for the tax the total net income, the legislator cannot prohibit the deduction of an expense which is clearly and entirely inherent, such as the IMU tax on business assets, unless such prohibition has a valid justification, which is lacking in the present case. This reasoning is fully agreeable. What raises serious concerns is the reasoning used to reject the unconstitutionality of the prohibition with regards to the following years, not only because it is clearly based on the need to protect public accounts, but also because the Court, instead of acting directly on the modulation of the effects over time of its judgment, seems to change opinion. While in the first part of the judgment, the one which refers to 2012, the Court describes the cancellation of the prohibition as mandatory, in the second part, the one which refers to the following years, it presents it as merely appropriate.