Italian authorities to crackdown on online poker players

It looks like Italy isn’t content with just taxing the online poker sites they legalized last year, as tax-news.com is reporting that the Italian Revenue Agency is taking a page out of the Swedish tax police’s playbook and investigating the professional poker players in the country.

According to the report in tax-news.com, the investigation is humorously named operation “All-In” and is looking into “the taxable earnings of poker players on offshore media, such as dedicated television channels.”

So, not only are the Italian authorities looking into online poker winnings, but also winnings from overseas, sponsorship money, and money won on television shows –which seems to be a direct implication of players like Dario Minieri and online qualifier Massimiliano Martinez who both recently appeared on an episode of the PokerStars Big Game, with Martinez booking a $163k win.

The Italian Revenue Agency is going back as far as 2006 according to the article, with a specific interest in the period from 2006 to 2009. In a show of goodwill the Italian Revenue Agency has invited any poker players who may have “forgotten” to declare winnings to head down to their local tax office and pay any taxes they may owe.

You may be wondering how the Italian authorities can come by this information: Well with the legalization and regulation of online poker in Italy the country now has complete access to a player’s winnings from the online poker sites –part of the terms and conditions a player agrees to in order to participate on a regulated site as well as information on who the prolific Italian poker players living in the country are.

Casino Research