UK secondary ticketing market investigated by tax office

The United Kingdom’s HM Revenue & Customs is to investigate the tax affairs of secondary ticketing companies.

This follows concerns raised with the Department of Culture Secretary Karen Bradley. Last month, as reported by TMN, a Department of Culture Media and Sport select committee summit in Parliament met with members of the live music industry, ticketing firms, academics and analysts.

During that meeting, Reg Walker, of Iridium Consultancy, told said, “This is meant to be a £1.2 billion (A$2 billion) industry in the UK alone, and yet we can only find a turnover of around £200 million ($339.3 million) on published accounts.”

HMRC said in a statement: “HMRC will always act where we believe individuals and businesses are not declaring their income correctly or paying the tax that they owe.

“Our compliance teams target specific sectors and locations where there is evidence of high risk of tax evasion and fraud and we use intelligence from various sources. In all cases, we look at compliance against a variety of taxes including VAT, self-assessment and corporation tax.”

The BBC reported that Ticketmaster – which owns resale sites Seatwave and Get Me In! and eBay-owned StubHub – declined to comment on the HMRC statement. Switzerland-registered Viagogo has not responded.

UK’s secondary ticketing agencies are feeling the heat of late. The Competition and Markets Authority is undertaking a compliance review into the four largest ones.

The Government is taking steps to ban bots that allow scalpers to buy up tickets to major tours and reselling them at inflated prices, and leaving fans out of the picture. The select committee meeting also expressed it was disturbed that ticketing agencies seem to have a close relationship with scalpers, indeed giving them a privileged position.

In June, the competition watchdog Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) put out a call for information on whether StubHub, Viagogo, Get Me In! and Seatwave are complying with their legal obligations.

These included providing information on any restrictions or additional charges on a ticket, its face value, whether seats are located together and a contact email for sellers – agreed with CMA in March 2015.