Tax authorities enlist Airbnb’s help

Greece’s tax administration intends to ask for help from short-term property leasing platforms in order to identify the owners or managers of some 20,000 properties that have not been declared to the Independent Authority for Public Revenue (IAPR) as they need to be in order to be given the necessary property registration number.

The authority will be reaching out to Airbnb first, in the new few days, and shortly after will continue with the properties listed on other popular rental platforms such as Booking.com and HomeAway.

In order to locate the tax dodgers, IAPR is making the most of data scraping program for automatically collecting information from the internet. This technique is considered particularly efficient for the collection of information on rates, turnover and online activity.

In this context, IAPR has set up a software robot that mapped out the online leasing platforms and identified the properties in Greece the tax authorities are interested in.

Based on the data collected about the active ads by hosts who own and list properties in Greece, about a quarter of all entries in Airbnb, which come to approximately 80,000, have not been declared, revealing the extent of tax evasion.