Our BNB is located in Wisconsin Dells are we are dealing with the EXACT same thing you are dealing with. Airbnb will not let us define and collect occupancy taxes on our own. Every time we call customer support our case gets forwarded to a "specialized department" that won't talk to us on the phone, they only respond to email. The usual response is copied and paste responses from AirBNB FAQs that DO NOT HELP US. What is happening is that ALL AirBNBs in Wisconsin are being collected and being submitted to the state in one lump sum. Our addresses are not submitted with this sum so all of the taxes that should be going to the county or the local city are not being distributed. For us... this is a HUGE headache because our local township is demanding that we pay them on a quarterly basis at 5% of our gross income. AirBNB is collecting this from each guest but NOT PAYING this... so guess what... we have to pay this out of our pocket. Here are some of the ridiculous responses from this specialized department. They suggest that we define custom taxes (a OPTION that is on available to us!!)
“This is Katrina, a supervisor with Airbnb. I understand you have some concerns regarding the occupancy tax being collected for your listings location.For your listings location, Airbnb is only collecting and remitting the State-administered taxes on your behalf. This means any tax you see that outlines the county or city, is remitted directly to the State only. Of course, this is if you had the "Default" tax option selected in your listing.If there are additional county or city taxes that you are required to remit directly to those tax authorities, it would be your responsibility to include that in the custom tax you currently have set on your listing under "local taxes and laws".If you have been remitting funds directly to the city and/or county, that would be the correct thing to do on your end under the circumstances.As customer service, we are not privy to the exact times or dates amounts are remitted to the state on your behalf.
Wisconsin Tax Collection and Remittance
https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/2337/occupancy-tax-collection-and-remittance-by-airbnb-in-wiscon...
Adding custom tax -https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/2523/how-do-i-add-taxes-to-my-listings
We will be filing one tax return per jurisdiction, with the total combined reservation revenue. This means that all hosts located in your area will be represented by one remitted amount, and we will not be providing your personal information on the return."
Our response that has not been responded to since October... Multiple cases open and closed prematurely, this specialized department not answering our questions, etc. etc.
Hello Katrina,
Thank you for clearing up a lot of our questions. It’s disappointing it took us 5 months of trying to get this answer after getting copy and paste answers from the website FAQ page. Still have a couple questions though.
How are hosts that are not as persistent as us supposed to know this?
If you pay all total taxes to the state including county and township taxes as states in charge to customer; how does the state pay out to the local government?
How does AirBNB make sure local governments (county and city) get paid as required per state statute?
As stated previously, our main issue is that our local treasurer needs to be paid quarterly and because she has not been paid by AirBNB, it is coming out of our own pocket. I understand that this is taken care of now that we have custom taxes defined with professional hosting tools turned on. We were never told by customer service that this was a resolution, we figured it out on our own! We still need to resolve the last 6 months of taxes since July 1, 2020.
Thank you for finally getting answers for us. We have spent countless hours writing emails to a specialized department that refuses to answer our questions or talk to us on the phone.
