MUMBAI, Nov. 12 (Xinhua) -- International payment platforms such as Visa, Mastercard and American Express may also be subjected to pay around 15-percent tax on their income in India as they set up servers locally to comply with a central bank directive on data storage.
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) had ordered payments companies to locally store data on all transactions taking place within India from Oct. 15, according to a report from the Economic Times on Monday.
"Visa, Mastercard and American Express are currently out of the tax net in India, as they do not have a "permanent establishment" in the country - they operate here through offices in jurisdictions such as Singapore and store data on servers located in countries like the United States and Ireland.
Permanent establishment, or place of business, is a concept in taxation that determines where an organisation is required to pay tax," the newspaper reported.
Tax suggestion over the RBI instructions might be a prelude to a greater stress that numerous different organizations, such as Google and Apple may also be confronted.
