Regarding Airbnb's handling of Occupancy (TOT) taxes.
On an issue related to the improper routing of tax payments, I am now facing an even more serious issue. I manage multiple properties under the same account. When I set up the first listing, I was prompted to enter a tax rate, and taxes were collected from renters and included in the payouts to the listed account. Those funds were then remitted to the local tax authority by the owner. About a year later, when I set up the second listing, no such option was available to input a tax rate. Instead, there was a notice indicating that taxes for the county my listing is in were collected and paid directly to the tax authority by Airbnb. Since I was not seeing the taxes flow through for reservations at this listing, I contacted Airbnb support, where they confirmed that the county was one where the taxes are paid automatically, and assured that the net payout would remain the same. I then asked for some kind of report providing the details of what was paid. After literally weeks of calling, writing, disconnects and closed threads stating "this issue was the topic of prior threads, this thread is now closed" I was finally informed that the taxes are paid in aggregate and they could not provide detail on a listing by listing basis. Since I'm still responsible for filing taxes on a monthly basis, I continued to press for this detail, with similar fruitless results. Finally, weeks later, I got a response. After months of relying on their previous advice, I was told that, while taxes were collected for listing in the County, they were NOT collected for the specific municipality where my listing is located. Aside from the obvious problem of not having collected or paid the proper taxes for tens of thousands in rentals, I don't currently have a mechanism to collect taxes going forward. This leads me to a number of critical questions for Airbnb:
- Why does Airbnb collect taxes for one of my listings but not the other, if they’re both in the same city?
- For every other county in California where Airbnb collects and remits taxes, it lists the specific municipalities in that county where it does not collect taxes, except in Riverside County where it does not list any specific cities. Given that Palm Springs is one of the most popular vacations destinations in the state, why would it omit that information?
- Why did Airbnb remove the option to enter a tax rate for properties in areas where it still needs to collects taxes? How are hosts supposed to specify a tax rate for Airbnb to collect?
- If the answer to the previous question is “through the resolution center” then how is that possible given that Airbnb doesn’t route resolution center payments (including taxes) to the account associated with each listing, but rather dumps them all into the default account?
- The tax rate here just increased by 1.5%. How can I change the rate for the property where you do collect and pass through taxes, when there is no longer a way to specify the tax rate?
- Why weren’t any of the support personnel able to correctly answer my simple question about whether taxes were being collected and remitted on this property?
I've brought these issues, as well as specific recommendations for what needs to be done to fix these issues, to Airbnb's attention via emails to support, but have yet to get any kind of response. This is going to cost me thousands in now-uncollectable taxes and penalties and put my entire business at risk. Is anyone else facing similar issues with the way taxes are being handled?
