State loses 6 million euro/month from taxes due for ridesharing platform drivers (COTAR)

Ridesharing platforms such as Uber, Bolt or Clever have defrauded the state budget over the last four years, making illicit revenues from unauthorized activities in our country, and the urgency of an Alternative Transport Ordinance is not justified, consider the representatives of the Confederation of Licensed Romanian Operators and Hauliers (COTAR), in a press release issued on Thursday for AGERPRES. 

They urge Deputy Prime Minister Daniel Suciu to withdraw from the decision-making transparency the OUG draft on alternative car and driver transport, "in order not to violate the legislation and the Constitution of Romania". 

"The Constitutional Court has decided that upholding a project through OUG is unconstitutional, the same project being under debate in the specialized committees of the Chamber of Deputies. Bypassing the examination and debate procedure of the draft law and having recourse to the engagement of responsibility of the OUG for this project do not have any grounding. In addition, there is a ruling by the European Court of Justice clearly showing that Uber transports people and not "ridesharing", the cited release mentions. 

According to COTAR, "it seems that both the Government of Romania, some politicians and the qualified bodies of the state are pretending now and forget how these multinational companies, "platforms" have circumvented the Romanian laws for four years, they have defrauded the state budget by obtaining illicit income from unauthorized activities on the territory of our country at the expense of authorized carriers." 

Operators and carriers also claim that the 30,000 "partners" who remain "without a job" are not employed. 
"The partner companies of Uber, Bolt, Clever, etc., have no employee with an employment contract. The question is why ANAF [the National Agency for Tax Administration, ed.n.] and ITM [Territorial Labor Inspectorate, ed.n.] did not check this situation The Romanian state lost in four years - only from the taxes that had to be paid for drivers - about 6 million euro per month," the officials of the Confederation draw attention. 

Recently, the Coalition for Digital Economy (ACED) filed with the Government the #wecontinue petition with more than 400,000 signatures to support ridesharing. 

"The Romanians, drivers and users have shown to the Government that they still want a civilized urban transport. We have demonstrated that the users and the drivers with whom we collaborate support the regulation of these modern urban transport services. We want the Romanian Government to keep the promise made by the Prime Minister herself and to adopt in the Government meeting this week the Emergency Ordinance regulating the urban mobility services," Catalin Codreanu, chairman of the Coalition for the Digital Economy Association said. 

The Association's data show that, annually, ridesharing services bring direct and indirect benefits of over one billion lei and offer a job for more than 20,000 partner drivers.