Azzano Offers Employees a Permanent Holiday in the Alps for Every Tax Evader They Drag Back to the Office
The town of Azzano has converted its tax recovery unit into a mountain expedition, granting staff a fully paid relocation to a converted cable-car station for each evader they personally escort to the municipal treasury.
AZZANO — Municipal employees who track down tax evaders will now be relocated, together with their immediate families, to a decommissioned cable-car station above the town, where they will live permanently as «Honorary Alpine Collectors» and receive a daily ration of polenta and tax forms, the town council announced on Tuesday.
The scheme, approved by a show of hands after a nine-hour meeting, converts the former tax office into a departure lounge with a single turnstile. Each employee who brings in one evader receives a numbered key to a mountain hut, a snow shovel, and a uniform consisting of a municipal scarf and a badge reading «I found one». The first four collectors left at dawn on foot, carrying backpacks filled with blank payment slips and a list of local shopkeepers.
«We are not punishing anyone,» said the deputy mayor for mountain affairs. «We are simply rewarding initiative with altitude. The higher you go, the more evaders you have found. It is a meritocracy of the slopes.»
Residents report that the cable-car station now smells of coffee and carbon paper. A waiting list for the huts has grown so long that the council has begun assigning tents on the ski slope. The town band has composed a march for each new collector, and the local bakery has renamed its best-selling pastry «The Evader's Doom».
By Friday, the first collector had already returned to town, not for supplies, but to ask whether the reward could be upgraded to a second hut for his mother-in-law.
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