AADE: The Tax Office follows 1,000 influencers – 2024-05-11 00:53:40

More than 1,000 are the Greek “influencers” who have been targeted by the Independent Public Revenue Authority through special risk analysis criteria and who are checked both for whether they show in their tax books the real income they obtain through social media and for whether the deposits or assets they have acquired are justified by their legitimate and declared activities.

As mentioned in “Vima tis Kyriaki” a senior official of the Ministry of Finance, “anyone who collects money through various popular social media applications for the Ministry of Finance, AADE and SDOE is considered to belong to the category of influencers. Essentially, the first control step depends on what everyone declares and not so much on the number of followers they have. Also, the number of views, i.e. how many times someone has seen a post, is a decisive factor to be targeted by the controls”.

Intersections

According to the same agent, the general directorate of audits of the AADE cross-checks from the various platforms what incomes have been received by all those who display products and services through the various electronic applications and websites and whether they have transferred them to their tax returns. Also, tax audit services can request information from social media platforms and find out when someone was advertised, what they received or what views their posts had.

From the various platforms, the audit services can derive detailed data on the income of the various “influencers”, while they can do the same from the advertisers themselves and then cross-references can be made.

Research

Recently the European Commission and consumer protection authorities from 22 member states conducted an investigation into the commercial practices of online influencers, examining social media posts from 576 influencers and revealing a worrying lack of transparency about the commercial content that include their posts.

Among them, 22 Greek mega-influencers were identified who will be checked for whether they mislead consumers with false or untrue information about the promoted products or services that fall under the EU Directive on unfair commercial practices and whether they communicate through their posts that they are for advertising activity.

The data collected by the European Commission shows, among other things, that while 8 out of 10 influencers carry out a commercial activity, only half were registered as traders at national level. Also, 1 in 3 did not provide company information on their posts, while almost all post that contain commercial content but only 1 in 5 routinely report it, while nearly 4 in 10 do not use the platform tags used to disclose commercial content content.

Receipts

The “tariff” for each photo in which a product is “tagged” is configured according to the number of followers the account owner has, the number of “likes” and “views” he receives. It also has to do with how many mentions are made within a certain period of time, while it matters if it is a photo that stays on the “wall” of the account holder, or if it is a simple “story” that remains active for 24 hours, or if it is a regular post. Someone who has up to 3,000-5,000 real followers can collect from 100 to 500 euros per month or per post-story package, while if the number of followers reaches 50,000 or 100,000 then the amounts collected are multiple.

The very powerful, i.e. those who have from 100,000 to 1,500,000 followers, receive accordingly very large amounts for each post or story they make, with the amounts ranging from 1,000 to 15,000 euros depending on the case (frequency, duration, etc.). However, most of them have companies that regularly declare them to the Tax Office. Of course, there are also those, like the well-known model, who, while they have hundreds of thousands of followers, have “forgotten” that the IRS also exists. In the end, however, when the IRS “likes” them, they find that it costs them dearly in fines and taxes.

At light

There are so many millions that are trafficked that it is difficult for someone to systematically hide them. At some point he will be found either through the platform or through the advertisers or even through the luxurious life he advertises on social media which is inconsistent with his actual declared income.