Freelancers INQUIRE in neighbouring countries about TAXES

President of the Association of Online Workers (Freelancers) in Serbia, Miran Pogacar, has said that he will submit a letter to the Embassy of North Macedonia on Friday, requesting an official answer on how the earnings of digital workers are taxed in that country.

He told the Beta agency that he would send letters with the same request to the other countries in the region, although „they know that there is no country whose tax service retroactively collected personal income tax as it is trying to do in Serbia, except for about 900 workers in Bosnia and Herzegovina“.

At the end of last year, the Tax Administration of Serbia sent freelancers tax decisions, based on the inspection of their work in the last five years, with, as they said, astronomical amounts.

After their protest in January this year, negotiations began with the representatives of the Government of Serbia, which, according to freelancers, were unsuccessfully completed by the offer of the Ministry of Finance to write off interest on those amounts, while the rest of the debt would have to be paid in monthly instalments for ten years.

No one taxes „retroactively“?

„They completely ignored our basic request that the previous period must not be taxed, which will certainly push online workers into debt slavery,“ said Pogacar.

He added that their request that the income of freelancers in the previous five years should not be taxes was justified because there was no law that regulated it, and the proof of that is the fact that many freelancers asked the Tax Administration if and how much they should pay taxes and they were told that there was no regulation in domestic legislation for the taxation of this type of work in the „platform economy“.

Pogacar said that they unofficially knew that there was a law on taxation of freelancers in all the neighbouring countries and that, for example, in North Macedonia, they paid income tax of ten percent.

He said that colleagues from neighbouring countries had informed them that their countries did not tax them „retroactively“, before the adoption of an appropriate legal and tax solution, and especially not for the past five years.

„With the official information from the embassies of the neighbouring countries, we want to show the Government of Serbia that there are adequate legal and tax solutions and that they should be applied in Serbia as well,“ Pogacar said.

Izvor: Beta

Foto: Pixabay