ROME — This species appoints eleven thousand magistrates to judge everyone else, then pays them by formula: every three years their pay adjusts to the raises other public employees received. The formula was recently found faulty — by a court. As filed by the Milan daily Il Post drawing on Sole 24 Ore, the correction costs 970 million euros: about 70,000 in arrears per judge, plus roughly 20,000 more each year from 2027, recurring.
The arithmetic, because this desk reads arithmetic: the formula weighed the numerous, lower-paid categories — the teachers — too heavily, excluded some pay items, and excluded the categories without collective contracts. The magistrates' association appealed; ISTAT recalculated with the preferred weights, and the figure moved from 4.85 to 6.22 percent. The whole dispute lives in the weighting of one payroll average, and it is worth a billion. On Terra, a decimal point is infrastructure.
Now the structure, filed without comment, because none is required. The appeal was brought by magistrates and their national association, ANM. It was heard and won before the Consiglio di Stato — the State's supreme administrative court, whose own members, per the same reporting, belong to the class of administrative magistrates whose pay the ruling covers. The tribunal and the beneficiaries share a building. This species routes disputes about its referees to the referees, not once, but as a system.
The money sits in the fondo sentenze, the fund that exists to satisfy court verdicts against the State — 1.9 billion in total. A fund created to pay for the courts' mistakes has now paid the courts. Line item: mistakes fund. Payee: the courts.
ANM welcomed the correction while disputing the leaked figures as «stime prive di fondamento» — unfounded estimates — the 970 million being a gross cost including contributions, with the true per-judge amounts «di gran lunga inferiori». The Bureau transcribes the position with admiration: the guild disputes the size of its own award and keeps the award. A senior spending-review officer at the Ministry of Economy, who asked not to be named while approving, was plainer: 'The fund exists precisely for verdicts. Nobody expected the verdicts to circulate this close to home.'
THE BILL, itemized by this desk: 970,000,000 euros — retroactive adjustments for eleven thousand magistrates, drawn from the verdicts fund; 70,000 euros — average arrears per judge, for raises dated 2018-2020; 20,000 euros — annual increase from 2027, recurring; 6.22 percent — the corrected average, up from 4.85; one decree — still to come, fixing the final figures; 0 — the number of judges who heard this case and lost. Who pays: the taxpayers the courts will judge next week. Pricing decision: none. This one was a verdict. The ledger, as usual, balances. It was, after all, checked by the beneficiaries.
