Modernare och enklare skattesystem för privat bildelning

The tax situation for private (peer-to-peer, P2P) carsharing in Sweden has been identified by platform operators and end-users as one of the key barriers for growth. Given a tax declaration system in Sweden that requires less to no effort on the individual’s side – declarations usually are pre-infilled and only need to be confirmed, via a digital interface – certain additional revenues like the ones from private carsharing, even if small, need to be filled in manually, posing a seemingly insurmountable barrier for the average Swedish taxpayer. Multiple platform operators within P2P carsharing shared their concerns over how this keeps people from starting to share their cars, while at the same time taking up quite some time on the platform operators’ sides for handling customers’ tax-related questions. Another issue is of course the tax burden itself – 30 percent of the revenues, minus a mileage deduction, which feels high, especially for individuals that choose to share their vehicles out of an environmental motivation and not with the main purpose to generate significant incomes. During a time where the car sharing market is growing significantly– many more people needed access to cars during the Covid-19 pandemic to avoid public transportation – and where all kinds of sharing need to be encouraged to achieve climate and environmental goals, this situation seemed inacceptable and prompted a Drive Sweden funded so-called policy lab project led by RISE Research Institutes of Sweden (RISE). Together with key stakeholders, namely platform operators for private carsharing and sharing of other private assets, the main challenges where identified, along with possible solutions. During the project the Swedish government conveniently proposed a tax deduction of SEK 20,000 (appr. EUR 2,000) for individuals’ revenues from the sharing economy, and the EU came with a directive to introduce a common tax reporting system for the sharing (and “gig”) economy throughout Europe (DAC-7). For both proposals, the project group identified improvement areas in order to foster long-term growth of the sharing economy, in line with national and international development goals. The report sheds light on these and other issues that came up in the numerous discussions and exchanges between a very heterogenous group of stakeholders, opening for further discussion and analyses to come