Greece’s financial audit authorities have targeted 20,000 properties leased via the Airbnb platform which were not declared to the tax office.

The Independent Authority for Public Revenue (IAPR) detected the owners of the properties had failed or neglected to assign the special property register number for short term leasing and declare it online, while IAPR also found that 130 owners had also failed to register income from long term property leases via Airbnb. The 20,000 owners could face a fine of up to 5,000 euros.

Using a special web scraping programme, the auditors checked the Airbnb platform and ascertained that the owners had not registered their properties to the tax office.
The Director of IAPR George Pitsilis instructed the auditors to immediately request from Airbnb to inform the IAPR of the details of the owners of the properties.

Meanwhile, the IPAR is expected to perform an online cross reference for all the properties on other popular platforms such as Booking.com and HomeAway, etc.