Air BnB's KYC policy only allows for 4 persons to be 'beneficial owners', which effectively discourages any property owned by more that 4 people or by a community of people from using the platform. For example where a property is owned by a trust not by a person, it may have 3 or more trustees, who are legally neither 'owners' nor can they benefit from the property, as that is the definition of their role, they are Persons with Significant Control (PSC) as they manage the trust but are not 'beneficial owners'. A trust can also have any number actual beneficiaries, these people are also not owners, the beneficiaries might be the local community, a large group of people, children or a family. However AirBnB KYC form forces these customers to describe themselves effectively as a company with a maximum number of 4 people each with a certain percentage of 'beneficial ownership' that effectively excludes community owned buildings or anything that is not actively owned by individuals. Why does this matter ? Because Air BnB is effectively forcing certain hosts to state that certain persons own and receive benefits from the rental of a property, even if they don't and legally cannot do so. This policy is there misleading and actually the opposite of KYC, because it forces customers to describe themselves in a way that is different to how they were set up. Forcing them to say that a maximum of four individuals own and receive benefit from a property even if they don't, what the various tax implications of this misrepresentation might be for those four individuals or for the community they represent is not clear. But what is clear is that Air BnB really don't care, they have 4 boxes which need filling for their own benefit irrespective of the consequences for a community organisation that uses the platform to generate a small amount of income, usually for the good.
