Romania may tax services from online platforms such as Uber, Airbnb

Romania’s Chamber of Deputies will discuss a draft bill that aims to tax services offered via online platforms such as Uber, Airbnb, and others, reports local Startupcafe.ro. The law draft’s text is ambiguous and doesn’t mention exactly what types of digital platforms are targeted. The draft bill aims to tax the individuals who provide various services in their spare time, such as drivers, painters, tutors, translators. The project also targets the technological platforms which intermediate such services, which may be obliged to create local support departments and to check the individuals who offer service through them. The bill’s statement of reasons indicates that the initiative targets platforms such as Uber, the best-known ride-sharing service, Airbnb, which provides short-term rentals, Freelancer, which intermediates programming, translation, and content creation services, Indiegogo, which provides crowd financing services, and others. The bill’s initiator is Varujan Pambuccian, the leader of the minorities group in the Chamber of Deputies. He says his aim is to bring to the surface the online peer-to-peer services market and that Romania may thus become the first country in the world to have such a law. editor@romania-insider.com