Airbnb will have to pay more than half a billion euros to Italian tax authorities

Airbnb has agreed to pay €576 million to Italian tax authorities to settle its tax case.

Italy’s financial police said the company failed to pay taxes on about 3.7 billion euros in rental income and claims the company owes about 779 million euros after examining tax years from 2017 to 2021, Bloomberg reported.

Airbnb is still discussing its taxes for 2022 and 2023, and the amounts in question could be “material,” the company said in a statement. The settlement, while less than the amount Italian authorities originally sought, still represents about a third of the company’s quarterly adjusted profit.

Authorities are stepping up scrutiny of how global companies operating in Italy pay taxes. According to sources cited by Bloomberg, Netflix also came under investigation by Italian prosecutors in 2019 for concealing tax information. Earlier this year, Milan prosecutors launched an investigation into Facebook’s parent company, Meta Platforms Inc. for allegedly unpaid value added taxes, the total amount of which amounted to approximately 870 million euros.

Meta responded through a spokeswoman that it “pays all taxes due in all countries in which it operates” and added that it “strongly disagrees with the idea that user entry into online platforms should be subject to value added tax.” However, she stressed that she would provide full cooperation to the judiciary.

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