Bucking was overlaid

Since January 2019, the Booking.com hotel reservation service began to include 20% of VAT on their services for its services

The headlines in the media wrote about the cover of the “tax loophole”, which allowed Russian hoteliers to get away from taxes. If earlier Booking.com partners from Russia had to directly pay the cost of VAT to the tax authorities, now Booking.com itself will pay and pay taxes. Experts predict that this can lead to an increase in the fiscal load on the owners of mini-hotels and small hostels.

Since January 2017, the so -called “Google tax” has been in force in Russia, which obliges foreign companies that sell electronic content on the Internet, to pay value added tax to the Russian budget. Electronic services that fall under the law include e -books, music, advertising services on the Internet, but the trade in physical goods is not taxed.

“Google tax” was accepted in order to equalize foreign companies with domestic in the tax burden. State protectionism in the tax sphere was accompanied by an attempt to import hotel in the sector of the hotel reservation services: in May last year, the Ministry of Culture instructed the Rostorism to check whether it was worth limiting the activities of the site in Russia. Then Rosturism decided that he had no authority to prohibit Booking.com, but he made the idea to create a domestic hotel reservation aggregator to create competition with the largest player in the market in this area.

Despite the fact that the new tax legislation in relation to foreign companies entered into force two years ago, the responsibility for calculating and paying taxes was assigned to Russian counterparties of foreign Internet companies-in this case, hotels and hotels that used the services of the service.

Thus, legal entities and individual entrepreneurs who worked with Booking.com were supposed to pay the service a commission for services that amounted to 10–25% of the amount of the armor of the room. At the same time, they acted as tax agents, that is, they themselves calculated and paid the tax 18% VAT from this commission (after the increase in the VAT rate - 20%).

According to the new rules, since this year, a foreign organization, which supply electronic services to Russian business partners, is obliged to register in Russia and independently pay taxes. For this, the Federal Tax Service has created a “VAT-office of a foreign Internet company”.

According to RBC, the owners of small hostels and hotels operating according to a simplified taxation system (simplified tax system) may suffer great losses because of this.

The fact is that earlier part of the hoteliers paid the Booking.com commission as individuals, that is, from personal accounts, and not corporate ones. This allowed them to move away from taxes, since the service itself did not control the receipt of VAT to the Russian budget. It is mainly about small hostels and hotels, whose main share of customers is provided by Booking.com.

- The hotel that uses the simplified tax system does not pay VAT from its own implementation, that is, it does not include it in the expense when it passes the number to customers. But such entities have never been exempted from the duties of a tax agent, ”said Igor Shikov, adviser to Russian tax and customs practice in the Moscow office of Dentons.

The exemption from VAT and a number of other taxes does not apply to cases when “simplists” work with foreign companies providing electronic services and have no representative offices in Russia.

Theoretically, only those who have gone from taxes have to be paid for problems: this measure should bring the “gray” sector of the mini-hotels to the “white”. One of the interlocutors of the “New”, managing the hostel, confirmed that the practice of paying for the commission from a private card really exists.

The hoteliers themselves are in no hurry to make forecasts about the collapse of their market. But they say that there was another reason to attract customers without the help of the service in order not to depend on intermediaries. “One month is difficult to say how much it affects the business, but, of course, this is an unpleasant innovation,” the “new” Olympic 22 told the “new” in the hostel.

- We can accommodate 72 people - half of them are provided to us by Booking.com. Therefore, you need to try to do so that people come to us directly - through our site, and not through intermediaries.

For those who initially paid VAT to the tax, the growth of the commission will not be so critical: “Now we are forced to pay more, but not because Booking.com is so bad - the amount of VAT has changed in Russia as a whole, and the service included the tax in its commission, it has grown. It is unpleasant, but nothing can be done, ”says the owner of the hostel Forma.

Today, 60% of his hostel customers come from this service: according to the owner of the hostel, this is an incentive for the "development of direct sales and other reservation sources."

The press service of the Dutch service stated the New ”that Booking.com BV is working hard to ensure that all local laws in countries where the platform operates. The company is registered with the tax authorities of the Russian Federation and appropriately charges VAT from partners, properly listing it to the Russian government, including in accordance with the new rules introduced in 2019. ”