The Estonian Parliament adopted on 14 December 2022 changes to the Tax Information Exchange Act, which introduce an obligation for digital platform operators (like Bolt, AirBnB, Amazon, Booking.com, etc) to start submitting information to the Tax and Customs Board on the sellers and providers of services operating on their platforms, as well as on income earned by them on these platforms. Until now, the respective exchange of information has been conducted on the voluntary basis and with these changes Estonia implements into its law Council Directive 2021/514 amending Council Directive 2011/16/EU on administrative cooperation in the field of taxation (DAC7), the rules of which rely on the OECD model.
The obligation to submit information to the Tax and Customs Board will arise generally to Estonian resident platform operators. Non-resident platform operators will have the respective obligation only when their place of management is in Estonia, when they have a permanent establishment in Estonia or they have legal presence which is founded under the Estonian law.
In addition, the obligation to submit information may arise to such non-EU platform operator, which has registered itself as such reporting entity with the Tax and Customs Board.
Platform operators will be generally required to collect respective information from 1 January 2023 and submit it to the Tax and Customs Board by the 31 January of the following year. However, in respect of the year of commencing the business activities the platform operator may apply the buffer period, by collecting the required information by the 31 December of the year following the year of commencing its business activities.
The documented evidence related to the collection of information should be preserved by the platform operator at least in respect of the current year and six previous years.
Platforms can be treated as virtual or digital market places, which connect the sellers of goods and services with their customers. According to the new changes of the law, the platform is deemed to be a software (website, mobile phone application, etc.), which allows to the seller to be connected with another users in respect of relevant activities, as well as application for collecting and making the payments related to these activities. However, the term of platform excludes any software, which merely enables to provide users the processing of payments (Paypal, etc.), the listing or promotion of goods or services or the transfer or removal of these items to the platform.
The relevant activity of platform operators which is subject to reporting includes the following activities rendered for remuneration:
- The rental of immovable property or part of such property;
- The time- or task-based work performed by any individual;
- The sale of goods;
- The rental of any mode of transport.
For above purposes, the remuneration is defined as any fee (regardless of its form), which is paid or credited to the seller and from which have been deducted all service charges, commission fees or taxes withheld or collected by the platform operator which are related to activities conducted in the platform and the amount of which is known or should be reasonably known to the platform operator. According to the explanatory letter to the draft law amendment, if the platform operator does not have any information in respect of fees and it is reasonably not possible to derive it, then its activity is not classified as a relevant activity subject to reporting – for example, in case where the platform operator has reasons to believe that the customer and seller have concluded a transaction through that platform, but the terms and conditions are not known to the platform operator and also no fees have been remitted through the platform from the customer to the seller (e.g. when the payment was made in form of cash transaction).
Finally, changes to the Act prescribe that license fees will become subject to the automatic exchange of information between the tax authorities of different countries (in addition to existing salary remuneration, board member’s fee, pension, life insurance benefit and real estate income).