Share This Article
The Italian Government has just established a task force against tax frauds in the gaming sector whose components are officers of the Ministry of Finance, the Tax Police and some tax agencies. according to the news of today.
The task force will cooperate with banks and financial intermediaries with the purpose of fighting against the illegal offering of games both online and land-based and therefore their primary targets in the online sector will be the platforms that are run without an Italian remote gaming license.
Indeed, after the recent Costa Cifone decisionof the European Court of Justice, apparently the strategy from the Government will not be anymore to challenge the crime of illegal offering of games without an Italian gaming license, but to challenge the tax evasion (i.e. the lack of payment of Italian gaming duties).
For this purpose, AAMS has recently published an interpretative circular clarifying the scope of Budget Law 2010 which in turns had clarified the obligation for non-licensed operators offering games to people located in Italy to pay Italian gaming duties (plus applicable penalties and interests for late payment). The reasoning behind the interpretative circular was that operators acting in breach of Italian law cannot enjoy a treatment more favorable than those acting legally that are obliged to pay Italian gaming duties. Also, the circular provided a place of consumption principle with reference to the applicability of Italian gaming duties and therefore any operators regardless of whether or not they hold an Italian remote gaming license shall be obliged to pay Italian gaming duties if involved in the offering of games to people located in Italy.
No major action so far has been taken against illegal websites while very aggressive actions have already been taken against the illegal offering of land-based games, but the scenario might change as a consequence of the establishment of this new task force.
Based on the above, operators offering games without an Italian license to Italian residents might be forced to speed up the launch of their Italian licensed platform. Likewise, it is unclear whether the task force will try to target also the illegal offering of games occurred in the past requesting the payment of retrospective taxes as recently occurred in Spain.
It will be interesting to see the developments on the matter, in the meantime if you want to discuss the topic, feel free to contact me, Giulio Coraggio.
(Visited 1 times, 1 visits today)
