EISA disseminates data on e-Residency, indicating that last year Estonia earned a revenue of €67.4 million from the program. This includes taxes received by the state and state fees. The costs associated with the program were in the order of seven million euros, thus the profit could be estimated at €60 million.

EISA measures this revenue from companies created by e-residents. If a company creates any connection with an Estonian e-resident within 90 days of its establishment, such as one of its shareholders or board members being an e-resident, it is counted as a legal entity producing tax revenue associated with e-residency until its operations cease.

According to EISA, e-residents have created 29,000 companies, 22,000 of which remain. About half of these are active, and last year over 2,000 companies paid taxes. On average, this amounts to €33,700 per tax-paying company.

The EISA e-Residency team regularly reports the program's revenue as if it were tax income that would not exist in Estonia without the program. However, which companies are involved and what exactly is considered in this revenue calculation is not known by the e-residency team.

"The e-Residency program team does not have the right to process e-residents' data due to personal data protection rules," Liina Vahtras, head of the e-Residency program, told ERR.

In Estonia, the annual reports of all companies, company owners, board members and the taxes paid by all legal entities are publicly available and published quarterly by the Tax and Customs Board (MTA), but EISA does not have a detailed breakdown of the taxes paid by e-residents.

The MTA justifies keeping data confidential under the Tax Administration Act. Specifically, paragraph 27 of the law outlines the data and reasons that the MTA can disclose, including information about a taxpayer's residency, taxes paid or similar details.

However, since state institutions have defined a company associated with an e-resident as one that has established a connection with an e-resident within 90 days from the company's registration, such data cannot be released because the law does not explicitly allow for the dissemination of such information.

Therefore, neither EISA nor the public can verify what is behind the numbers reported about e-Residency.

For example, the Lithuanian retail chain Maxima has several subsidiaries in Estonia, whose boards likely include Estonian e-residents who are Lithuanian citizens. Whether these companies are included in the statistics of the e-Residency program's success story is impossible to assess.

It's also impossible to verify, for example, whether the activities of Timothy Heath, an Australian who primarily develops online gambling games, are included in the statistics. Or how many companies reflected in the statistics were founded by Estonians who have, for instance, one e-resident living in Estonia in their circle.

How many of the companies paying taxes in Estonia, as reflected in the statistics, are actually the result of individuals attracted by the e-Residency program to establish a company? For example, people who have registered as Estonian e-residents, founded a company here, and successfully opened a bank account for the company through Wise, Revolut or another bank, paying taxes without having a significant connection to Estonia. Their goal might be, for example, to maintain a specific low-cost point of transaction while constantly moving or to reduce or avoid tax payments.

EISA says that settling transactions through a company established via the e-Residency program does not provide a tax advantage, but it's conceivable how it could be possible to extract money from a company founded in Estonia to evade taxes in another country.

In any case, EISA does not know which companies are actually e-residents' companies, why they are e-residents' companies, and how much they contribute to the budget in taxes and fees.

"We only see data related to e-resident entrepreneurship in an aggregated form by sector of activity, with the data compiled for us by the MTA (Tax and Customs Board) and Statistics Estonia as a result of queries," Vahtras noted.

EISA also cannot assess the potential effectiveness of its three-year advertising plan costing two million euros, which aims to promote e-Residency in the European Union, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, the USA, Australia, Canada and Singapore.

EISA does not know how much of the tax revenue figures presented as a success story have been brought in by companies operating in Estonia, where some key individuals have been e-residents, and how much is due to the activities of foreign citizens who started paying taxes in Estonia because of the excellent e-Residency program.

EISA justifies the international advertising campaign, which initially includes spending €60,000 on a three-month digital campaign in Spain, by stating that Spain is one of the fastest-growing markets, with Spanish citizens' interest in e-Residency and company formation significantly increasing.

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