Airbnb, hosts are also at risk: “Most have not paid the rent tax”
The investigation into the alleged evasion of Airbnb could also shine a light on the owners who, through the platform, rented houses and apartments without paying taxes. This was reported by La Repubblica, after the maxi-seizure ordered by the judge of preliminary investigations in Milan.
The Milan prosecutor’s office accuses the short-term rental giant of five years of failure to return tax returns. An accusation that pushed investigating judge Angela Minerva to order the preventive seizure of over 779 million euros against Airbnb Ireland Unlimited Company, a company incorporated under Irish law, and three managers of the group.
The hypothesis is that the company did not pay the so-called “dry tax” on 3.7 billion euros of rental payments, paid between 2017 and 2021 by guests of the accommodation facilities that use the platform.
The seizure follows the pronouncements of the European Court of Justice and the Council of State. The first, in December 2022, expressed its opinion on the compatibility with EU law of the Italian legislation introduced in 2017. At the end of October the council of state filed the reasons for the sentence with which it established the obligation for Airbnb to collect and pay to Tax withholding tax on short-term rentals.
The company would therefore have had to withhold taxes, in addition to the commission, from the payments paid to the “hosts”. However, this was not the case, according to what the investigating judge wrote in the seizure decree. It would therefore have been up to the owners of the houses to pay the taxes but, as emerged from the investigation, the majority of them did not do so. According to Repubblica, it is not excluded that the case will end up under the scrutiny of the Financial Police and the Revenue Agency.
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