Chile’s tax authority moved last week to bring foreign online betting platforms inside the country’s digital value-added tax regime, a step that has reignited a long-running political fight over the legality of the offshore online betting market. On 2 June the Internal Revenue Service, issued Exempt Resolution 69, signed by its director Jorge Trujillo Puentes.
The resolution opens a registration system for operators without domicile or residence in Chile that provide betting, gambling, casino and analogous services online, requiring them to register, declare and pay VAT under the simplified digital-services regime that already applies to foreign streaming and similar providers.
The tax falls on the total contributions received as remuneration, and platforms active over the previous thirty-six tax periods must settle the unpaid balance via the F129 or digital VAT form.
The political response was immediate. Finance Minister Jorge Quiroz defended the measure publicly, telling reporters that the tax authority’s statutory duty is to raise tax on the activities that are subject to it. In no case, he added, was there hidden regulation.
At the same time the tax authority itself was at pains to specify that its resolution dealt exclusively with tax obligations and that questions of authorisation, sectoral oversight and the lawfulness of the activities themselves fell to other competent bodies.
However that qualification did not satisfy the resolution’s critics in the Senate. The Economic Affairs Committee summoned Trujillo to appear and explain the measure.
Senator Gastón Saavedra of the Socialist Party said the resolution came to legitimise and validate illegal online betting. Deputy Ricardo Celis of the Party for Democracy said the tax authority had overstepped the mark; and Diego Ibáñez of the Broad Front said the move amounted to administrative legalisation of an irregular business in concession to the betting-house lobby.
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.
The initiative was first introduced in March 2022 under the Piñera administration and retained by the Boric government, which used repeated urgency motions has now been accelerated again under President José Antonio Kast.
Under the bill, operators would need to apply for a general operating licence and to constitute themselves in Chile as closed corporations with an exclusive object. The existing Superintendency of Gaming Casinos would be transformed into the Superintendency of Casinos, Betting and Games of Chance, with powers to grant licences, supervise technical compliance, sanction infringements and obtain remote real-time access to platforms for monitoring bets, payments and financial flows.
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Chile’s tax authority moved last week to bring foreign online betting platforms inside the country’s digital value-added tax regime, a step that has reignited a long-running political fight over the legality of the offshore online betting market. On 2 June the Internal Revenue Service, issued Exempt Resolution 69, signed by its director Jorge Trujillo Puentes….
The post Chile’s tax authority obliges foreign online betting platforms to pay VAT on Chilean operations appeared first on G3 Newswire.