Chile’s tax authority has mounted a formal defence of its move to bring foreign online betting platforms inside the country’s digital value-added tax regime.
The director of the Internal Revenue Service (SII) Jorge Trujillo Puentes, appeared before the Economic Affairs Committee of the Senate to explain Exempt Resolution 69, the act issued on 2 June opening a registration and payment mechanism for foreign-domiciled platforms offering online betting, casino games and analogous services to users in Chile.
With Resolution 69, Trujillo told the committee, the tax authority was not encouraging or promoting online gambling.
“The SII with this Resolution 69 is not encouraging or promoting the activity. What we are doing is collecting taxes owed on activities effectively carried out”, he told the committee. In addition the mechanism was confined to online casinos and analogous services whose operation could be effectively verified, with registered platforms required to settle value-added tax for the previous thirty-six tax periods. “It does not fall to the SII to rule on legality, but to apply the rules for collection”, Trujillo said.
The opposition senators had set out their positions publicly in the days before the hearing, when they announced they would summon the SII director and write to the Comptroller General.
Senator Gastón Saavedra of the Socialist Party, who chairs the committee, said at the time that Resolution 69 “comes to legitimise and validate online betting of an illicit nature, without knowing where the resources used come from”, and accused the tax authority of “facilitating gambling addiction and indebtedness, bypassing Congress, bypassing democratic debate”.
Meanwhile Senator Diego Ibáñez of the Broad Front said the SII was “assuming a power that does not belong to it” with a resolution that “seeks to legalise under the rug, using an administrative route, a business that today is illegal, and which we are precisely trying to regulate in the Senate”.
At the hearing itself, the senators reiterated those concerns, recalling that the Supreme Court has declared online betting illegal and that a regulatory bill is currently before Congress.
The committee summoned Finance Minister Jorge Quiroz and the Superintendence of Casino Gaming to its next session and resolved to write to the Supreme Court itself, asking the court to rule on the apparent contradiction between Resolution 69 and its earlier finding that online gambling without express authorisation is unlawful.
The news comes as the government is moving closer to approving online gambling regulation. In May the Chilean executive granted the highest legislative urgency to Bill 14838-03, which seeks to regulate online betting platforms and is now in its second constitutional reading in the Senate.
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Chile’s tax authority has mounted a formal defence of its move to bring foreign online betting platforms inside the country’s digital value-added tax regime. The director of the Internal Revenue Service (SII) Jorge Trujillo Puentes, appeared before the Economic Affairs Committee of the Senate to explain Exempt Resolution 69, the act issued on 2 June…
The post Chile’s tax authority defends its VAT resolution on foreign online betting platforms before the Senate appeared first on G3 Newswire.