Airbnb’s Irish unit to pay €576m to settle Italian tax claim

Airbnb’s Irish unit agreed to pay the Italian tax authorities €576 million to settle allegations that it hadn’t paid enough tax.

The San Francisco-based home-sharing company does not acknowledge “any liability” as part of the settlement, it said in a regulatory filing on Wednesday. Airbnb’s European headquarters are in Dublin.

Italy’s finance police had claimed that the company failed to pay taxes on about €3.7 billion of rental revenue, and claimed the company owed about €779 million after an audit of the tax years from 2017 to 2021.

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Airbnb is still in discussions about its taxes for 2022 and 2023, and the amounts involved may be “material”, the company said in a statement.

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The settlement, while lower than the amount Italian authorities had initially pursued, is still equivalent to about a third of the company’s quarterly adjusted earnings.

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Authorities are ramping up scrutiny of how global companies operating in Italy pay tax. In 2019, Italian prosecutors investigated Netflix after the US streaming company failed to file a return, sources said at that time. Earlier this year, Milan prosecutors started investigating Facebook parent company Meta for alleged unpaid value-added taxes that totalled about €870 million, sources said last February.

A spokesman for Italy’s tax agency declined to comment. – Bloomberg