Cabinet de Avocat
Mihai Cătălin LUCA
Prin Avocat Senior,
Teodora LUCA
On May 25th, the deadline expires for participants in online gambling activity or poker festivals who have earned income from these activities in 2016; they have the obligation to forward the statement of revenues to the tax office.
All of this revenue has been reported to the tax office for information purposes only and by the gambling organizers who submitted the status of the payments made during the previous fiscal year to each player by February 28th. The players’ transactions on the remote gambling platforms are kept by the organizers for a minimum of 6 years from the date of registration, thus ensuring also the possibility of the fiscal body to initiate the enforcement action of the tax obligations within the prescription term.
In order to support players’ efforts to prepare this statement, an informative statement about all earnings earned on the platform during the previous fiscal year was communicated , according to the law, by gambling organizers and for participants who are required to Prepare and submit this tax form.
The Statement of Income obtained in 2016 (Form 200) is submitted to:
a) the central fiscal body in whose territorial jurisdiction the taxpayer has the address where his / her domicileis , according to the law, or the address where he / she actually lives, if different from his / her domicile, for the persons who have their tax domicile in Romania;
b) the competent central fiscal body, according to the law, for the administration of individual taxpayers, without fiscal domicile in Romania.
The declaration shall be filed directly with the fiscal body’s registry or by post, by registered letter with acknowledgment of receipt.
The declaration may also be submitted by electronic means of distance transmission for taxpayers holding a digital certificate and they shall in advance perform the registration procedure with the tax authority.
The date of filing the declaration is the date of its registration with the tax office or the date of deposit to the post office, as the case may be.
On the basis of the declaration submitted by the taxpayer, the fiscal body will draw up and send to each taxpayer the tax return form.
Income tax on on-line gambling is calculated differently, by applying the scale provided by the provisions of Article 110 paragraph 10 of the Fiscal Code, to each revenue received by the taxpayer:
Within 60 days of receipt of the tax return, players are required to pay tax on earnings from gambling activities.
Until the expiration of the payment term, no late or overdue penalties will apply.
In the context in which the public debate proposes to regulate the so-called household tax, the way in which the provisions of art. 110 of the Fiscal Code will be applied appears to be a test both for the tax body and for taxpayers.
In the analyzed case, the fiscal body will have additional means to verify the accuracy of the data submitted by the taxpayer, insofar as the statements submitted by the organizers will be processed by the fiscal body responsible for the tax administration of the company and forwarded to the fiscal body responsible for the tax administration of the individual, in charge of which the payment obligation is established.
Not to be neglected is the likelihood that an individual would have earned income from activity on different platforms of gambling, which means centralizing the data transmitted by all licensed operators, if it is intended to carry out a control of the data communicated by the taxpayer .
The taxpayer’s omission to register the tax return within the time limit prescribed by the law is sanctioned with a contraventional fine of the amount between 1.000 and 1.500 lei, being determined by the tax body according to the circumstances in which the act was committed, if there are no indications that a crime has been committed.
In the previous year, online gambling organizers proposed changing tax rules in an attempt to identify an efficient tax collection and bureaucracy avoidance, unanimously judging that withholding taxes at the origin would be a welcomed solution for all parties involved.
It remains to be seen whether, in the current context, which seems to favor the idea of transferring the reporting and payment obligations from the payer to the beneficiary, the legislator will embrace their proposal and simplify this procedure by establishing that the tax obligations are executed at he moment of receipt of income through withholding the money owed.
