ROME (Reuters)

Italian ruling-coalition lawmakers are urging the government to scale back plans to increase taxes on cryptocurrency capital gains and expand the number of firms forced to pay a digital tax, a parliamentary document showed on Tuesday.

Both proposals are part of more than 300 "priority amendments" that the ruling parties have submitted to change Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni's budget for next year, testing her ability to keep lawmaker requests at bay.

Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti intends to hike taxation on capital gains from cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin to 42% from 26%.

However, his party colleague Giulio Centemero, supported by other lawmakers, opposes the move and has submitted an amendment to scale back the tax increase to 28%, rather than 42%.

To overcome the party spat, Giorgetti this month said he was ready to review the measure by considering different forms of taxation.

The co-ruling Forza Italia party, led by Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, also promoted an amendment to maintain the impact of Italy's web tax focused on big tech such as Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META), Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL), and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN).

Italy introduced a 3% levy on revenue from internet transactions for digital companies with annual sales of at least 750 million euros ($790 million), provided these companies make at least 5.5 million euros in Italy.

Now, as part of the budget bill, the Treasury proposes to remove these minimum conditions for the tax to be applied, a move critics argue would negatively affect small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

If approved, Forza Italia's amendment would preserve the two revenue floors.

Giorgetti has also mentioned that extending the scope of Italy's web tax could help the government avoid conflicts with the United States, which views the scheme as unfair discrimination, mainly targeting U.S. tech companies.

($1 = 0.9459 euros)