Opinion 'Google rate': necessary, but hasty
Taxes The Senate approves the 'Google' and 'Tobin' rates and they will take effect in January
Amazon has begun warning suppliers and manufacturers that it will charge the government-approved 3% rate.
This Tax on Certain Digital Services, known as the
Google rate
, came into effect on January 16, 2021 after the law was approved by the Senate in October last year with 134 votes in favor, 101 against and 28 abstentions.
As El Mundo announced in September 2019, the rate has ended up having an impact on sellers, as has already happened in France since October of that year.
"After the introduction in France of a new tax on digital services (...) we are forced to adjust the rates of our sales on Amazon.fr," the company said at the time.
Although then Amazon preferred not to comment on the possibility of the same happening in Spain, knowledgeable sources already assured that the policy would be the same in all countries that second the rate.
As the company explains in an email sent to small and medium-sized companies that use its page to sell products, from April 1 it will increase referral fees by 3%.
This change will be applied to products sold in Spain "to reflect this additional tax."
Amazon provides an example in this same informative email: in a product whose sale price is 100 euros and whose reference rate is 15.00%, as of April the rate will become 15.45%, so 15.45 euros will be paid.
Then, it refers to its help page for sellers to obtain more information, according to
El Confidencial
.
This measure would affect, in principle, the more than 9,000 SMEs that sell products on its page, according to the latest data published by the company.
Of these, more than 300 were over a million dollars in sales and in total they exceeded 40 million products sold between June 1, 2019 and May 31, 2020, the latest period for which data has been provided.
The
Google rate
would not only affect the search engine and Amazon, but, in theory, it could also 'touch' companies such as Facebook or Apple and follows in the wake of a similar law established in France in 2019 that also had an impact on sellers in the country.
Other European countries, such as Italy, have taken similar measures despite the fact that it was a clash with the US government (the US Secretary of the Treasury even sent a letter to María Jesús Montero demanding that she stop the plan and threatening retaliation).
At the moment it is not known if the Biden administration will continue this line.
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Maria Jesus Montero
Spain
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Google rate
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