eBay has been registered as a taxpayer in Uzbekistan and will now pay value added tax (VAT). eBay Inc is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California.
While, Meta, Netflix, Apple, Samsung, Booking.com, Facebook, Spotify, LinkedIn and other foreign companies are also registered at the VAT office.
The so-called Google tax is stipulated by the new edition of the Tax Code, which took effect on January 1, 2020. A month later, the State Tax Committee opened a special VAT office so that foreign Internet companies could register as payers.
The former Deputy Chairman of the State Tax Committee Abdulla Azizov, now serving as Deputy Minister of Health, said that neighboring countries were interested in how Uzbekistan managed to introduce this practice into the tax system.
“When I presented the new system to the State Tax Committee and collected taxes from Google, Apple, Netflix and other international companies, people called from Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and Tajikistan and asked how we did it. We shared our experience,” he said.
The deputy Health Minister hopes that neighboring countries will show the same interest after the digitalization of the healthcare system in Uzbekistan, on which he is currently working.
Former regional director of Yandex for Uzbekistan Yevgeny Lukyanchikov called the decision to introduce a Google tax a digital suicide." He said that the introduction of this tax provides for the abolition of double taxation under international treaties. The State Tax Committee explained that this was not a new tax, but "a mere VAT extended to e-sphere.
