Czech Constitutional Court: Prostitutes Must Pay Taxes

The Czech Constitutional Court, after several years of legal disputes, has ruled that prostitutes must pay income tax to the state, since voluntary sex for money is not a criminal offense like pimping, i.e., mediation of prostitution.

A Czech beauty of the night once refused to pay the tax that the tax administration retroactively imposed on her for 2013 and 2014, and even took her appeal to the Constitutional Court, arguing that if the state collects tax from her, then, as she stated, the state itself becomes a pimp, which is a criminal offense.

Tax authorities noticed that this woman was exchanging cash in euros for crowns and depositing it into her account, and she explained that these were earnings from prostitution, which in her opinion are not taxable.

Later, in her appeals against the tax authorities’ decision, she stated that politicians had occasionally said that voluntary prostitution is not taxed, so she quite legitimately expected that she did not have to pay tax.

“The state taxes real economic income and increases in assets, not the legal or moral basis of profit. Taxation is not a moral approval of an activity nor recognition of that activity by the state,” the Constitutional Court explained in rejecting her appeal.

Judge Jiří Přibáň included money from voluntary sex among the incomes of so-called liberal professions, which include artists, athletes, and models.

“The aim of the state is to fairly prescribe the tax burden. The Constitutional Court believes that when income from voluntary business in the sex industry is legal, and thus subject to taxation, this only strengthens the social position of these individuals in the long term,” Přibáň concluded in the reasoning of the verdict, Czech media report.