Various foreign banks with branches in Italy that act as intermediaries for the purposes of tax refund applications filed on behalf of nonresident persons received a notice from the Italian tax agency in charge with the refund procedure announcing the application of stricter controls in the processing of the tax refunds. The tax office will require specific information about the beneficial owners of the refund in order to avoid abuses and treaty shopping. The banks shall have to provide the complete personal information about the final beneficiaries of the refunds, including their foreign and Italian taxpayer identifications numbers. In case of trusts or funds, the tax agency will require the taxpayer identification number issued in the residence state as well as in Italy both to entity and its legal representative. As a consequence, if the trust or fund is a fiscally transparent entity that does not have a taxpayer identification number in its own country, the bank may need to provide the information about the final investors or the grantors or  beneficiaries of the trust. The new approach follows recent audits that resulted in the denial of the refund of dividend tax credits to various banks that engaged in dividend washing transaction (for a total amount of about 4.2 billion euro).