Substitutive document conservation is a legal / IT procedure  regulated by the  law  Italian , able to guarantee the legal validity of a  IT document , intended as a representation of deeds or facts and data on a paper or computer support.

Digital preservation means replacing paper documents, which by law some  legal entities  are required to keep, with the equivalent  document  in format  digital  which is "blocked" in form, content and time through the  digital signature  and the  time stamp . It is in fact the digital signature technology that allows you to give authorship and make an electronic document unchangeable, then flanked by the  time stamp  which allows the digital document produced to be dated with certainty.

From a general regulatory point of view, the rules governing the matter are contained in the  Decree of the President of the Council of Ministers of 3 December 2013 ("Technical rules on the conservation system pursuant to articles 20, paragraphs 3 and 5-bis, 23-ter, paragraph 4, 43, paragraphs 1 and 3, 44, 44-bis and 71, paragraph 1, of the Digital Administration Code referred to in Legislative Decree no. 82 of 2005 "which repeals Cnipa Resolution no. 11/2004)  , to the extent of our greatest interest since  Ministry of Economy and Finance Decree of 17 June 2014 “Methods for fulfilling tax obligations relating to IT documents and their reproduction on different types of media - Article 21, paragraph 5, of Legislative Decree no. 82/2005 "which repeals the Ministerial Decree of 23 January 2004.

The aforementioned provision dictates the lines that must guide the document archiving processes of tax documents in order to make them all fully valid in the same way as paper documents, which in fact can therefore be completely abolished .

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