Tax challenges in the collaborative economy

Abstract

A variety of collaborative economy business models are rapidly emerging and growing across the world, calling for changes in traditional tax policies. Although the collaborative economy shows a rapid growth, the review of the existing taxation practices within the collaborative economy reveals inefficiency, associated mainly with the blurred boundaries among professional and non-professional service providers, with the avoidance to cooperate from collaborative platforms and with the fragmentation in taxation regimes among EU member states and worldwide. The aim of this paper is to investigate tax challenges arising from the collaborative economy and to offer a comprehensive model of the tax system development in the collaborative economy. Accordingly, this paper demonstrates the results of systematization of the collected task-oriented data and the description of the proposed model developed by the generalisation approach. Data collection and systematization methods have been used. The authors conclude that the taxation of the collaborative economy must be investigated on the global level by using collaborative economy instruments (platforms and scoring). The role of awareness of both service providers and tax administrations is stressed in the discussion part.