Project on the ad taxation ‘will in no way limit freedom of speech and will not hit media pluralism,’ assured Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki on Saturday. He also informed that he intends to present in Brussels ‘a Polish vision of regulations concerning digital space management’.
At the beginning of February, a draft amendment was included in the government’s legislative work list, which will result in the introduction of a tax on internet and conventional advertising. According to the assumptions, half of the revenue from advertising premiums is to go to the National Health Fund (NFZ).
On Saturday (13 Feb 2021), Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki in a Facebook post stressed that the government’s action ‘is part of a general trend of work at the EU and OECD aimed at fairer taxation of global corporations, primarily in the internet sector, but also in the media sector’.
‘Our concept anticipates some solutions and follows those already implemented in the Union so that the introduction of a digital tax at the EU or OECD level does not require us to subsequently change our law, but only a possible adaptation,’ added Prime Minister.
According to him, ‘revenues from intangible items such as branding, intellectual property rights or advertising are particularly easy to shift in accounting terms between companies within multinationals, thus avoiding taxation’.
‘The published financial data of corporations that would be subject to this tax confirms this – most pay only a fraction of a per cent of their revenues in the form of CIT,’ pointed out Morawiecki.
He assured that ‘tax, thanks to the very high tax-free amount, will not affect smaller, local or regional media at all’. According to the Prime Minister, this is ‘in line with the case-law of the Court of Justice of the EU’.
Morawiecki stipulated that ‘the specific arrangement of rates and tax-free amounts may change as the work proceeds’. ‘This is what the consultation process is for. However, even in its published form, the draft will in no way restrict freedom of speech and will not hit media pluralism. On the contrary, it can break the oligopoly of international moguls that dominate the Polish media market, which causes a hysterical reaction of circles taking advantage of this oliogopolisation of the media message under one dictate,’ wrote Prime Minister Morawiecki.