The Swedish tax agency, Skatteverket, is targeting online poker players and affiliates. Skatteverket uses an online “spider,” or web crawler, to find web sites that appear to be income producing. They then investigate to see if they’ve reported income and/or paid their Swedish income tax. A report in Poker News says that Sweden has found 47 cases of unreported income totaling €44.5; poker players, according to Poker News, represented €5 million of this.
Sweden apparently, like the United States, taxes all gambling income. I’ve reported on spiders before, and noted that the IRS won’t confirm or deny whether they use such software. However, the IRS doesn’t need that sophisticated software to make some headway into determining who has and hasn’t reported their online gambling income. Neteller is cooperating with the US Department of Justice. What agency in the United States might want information about gambling income besides the Department of Justice? As I’ve said before, not reporting your online gambling income is not only a violation of US law, you’re now likely to get caught given Neteller’s cooperation.