The Training 4.0 tax credit for BIM courses

Our technical BIM courses (Building Information Modelling), run with the training institute Public Procurement Institute, are classified under the 2018 Budget Law (Law no. 205/2017) as training activities eligible for the BIM Training 4.0 tax credit, as they fall within staff upskilling in new construction and engineering technologies.

The incentive on offer is an important opportunity to seize, because it makes it possible to invest in professional training, which is both technically effective and necessary in view of the BIM process becoming mandatory from January 2019, and worthwhile from an economic point of view, since the tax credit amounts to 40% of the company's cost for its employees for the period in which they attended one of our training activities, up to a maximum of €300,000 a year for each beneficiary, which means the incentive is not tied to the actual cost of the training course.

So if 4 employees attend one of our courses, such as the one on BIM for infrastructure works, the tax credit will be 40% of the company's cost for those 4 employees: assuming that cost is €40,000, the tax credit will be €16,000.

However, the BIM tax credit is temporary and applies only to costs incurred in 2018, that is, in the tax period following the one in progress at 31 December 2017.

The incentive is open to all businesses, including newly established businesses, regardless of legal form, economic sector, accounting regime and method of determining taxable income, including permanent establishments in Italy of non-resident companies and non-commercial entities, solely for any commercial activity they carry out.

The National Enterprise 4.0 Plan allows companies to use the tax credit for training courses on technologies relating to:

- digital integration of business processes

- big data and data analytics; human-machine interface;

- cloud and fog computing;

- cyber security;

- cyber-physical systems;

- rapid prototyping;

- visualisation systems and augmented reality;

- advanced and collaborative robotics;

- additive manufacturing;

- internet of things and machines.

Training activities will be agreed through company-level or local collective agreements and will cover the following areas:

- sales and marketing;

- IT and technical skills;

- production technologies.

And it is in the third area (production technologies) that we find the item “construction and engineering technologies (Building Information Modelling)”.

The BIM tax credit can of course be used as an offset from the tax period following the one in which the costs are incurred, so for costs incurred in 2018, the BIM tax credit can be offset from 2019.

In addition, the benefit of the incentive

- must be stated in the tax return for the tax period in which the eligible costs were incurred and in the returns for the following tax periods until it has been used up;

- does not count towards taxable income or the IRAP (regional tax on productive activities) tax base;

- does not count towards the ratio used to determine the deductibility of interest expense, costs and other negative items (Articles 61 and 109(5) of the TUIR, the Italian Consolidated Income Tax Act);

- is not subject to the annual limit of 250,000 for the use of tax credits (Article 1(53) of Law no. 244/2007) or to the maximum limit of €700,000 for offsetting tax credits and contributions (Article 34 of Law no. 388/2000);

- applies in accordance with EU rules on the compatibility of aid with the internal market.

Feel free to contact our office for more information on our training plan: T. +39 06 80692287 info@publicprocurementinstitute.com