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Tax investigation of 9 Japanese influencers for ‘3 billion tax evasion’… has hundreds of thousands of followers

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In Japan, nine influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers were found to have evaded taxes of about 3 billion won and were fined over 800 million won.

According to the Yomiuri Shimbun on the 8th (local time), the Tokyo National Tax Service revealed that as a result of a tax investigation on nine influencers, they discovered that they had evaded tax of 300 million yen (about 3 billion won) for about six years.

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The National Tax Service imposed fines of 1 million to 30 million yen (approximately 10 million to 290 million won) each, including additional tax, and the total amount of these fines reached about 85 million yen (approximately 815 million won).

These are female influencers in their 30s who are active on Instagram and YouTube, and are known to have hundreds of thousands of followers each.

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As a result of the research, they received advertisements through a platform that connects businesses and influencers. It was investigated that they received advertising expenses in proportion to the number of followers and views in return for posting advertisements such as “products developed with a doctor” and “must try” while using cosmetics or massagers provided by the company.

The tax authorities found that they either omitted or did not report some of the income they received from such advertisements, and some of them hid their income by disguising sales of products sold through SNS as income from overseas paper companies.

Meanwhile, the influencer advertising market in Japan has been growing rapidly in recent years. As a result of a survey by SNS marketing company Cyber ​​Buzz, the market size this year is more than twice that of 2020, at 74.1 billion yen (about 710 billion won), and is expected to reach 130.2 billion yen (1.25 trillion won) in 2027.

In particular, the Yomiuri Shimbun reported that many office workers are jumping into SNS advertising as a side job due to the fact that they can start relatively easily. In response, the tax authorities said they would strengthen related investigations and asked taxpayers to report in good faith.

Source: Donga

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