London: Germany's former capital Bonn has introduced parking meters for prostitutes in a bid to tax the world's oldest profession, a media report said here. Prostitutes working the streets of Bonn now have to buy tickets from roadside vending machines that once dispensed tickets to the city's drivers.
A night's ticket will set a prostitute back 5.30 pounds, irrespective of the number of clients they have, The Telegraph said.
Like parking metres, the machines also tell users the times of day when a ticket is necessary: in this case between the hours of 8.15 p.m. and 6 a.m., Monday to Sunday.
The ticket machines would bring street prostitutes into fiscal line with their peers in registered sex establishments, the newspaper quoted Monika Frombgen, a spokeswoman for Bonn city council, as saying.
"This is an act of tax fairness," she said. "Prostitutes in fixed establishments such as brothels and sauna clubs already pay tax."
She added that with many foreign born street prostitutes previous attempts to tax them had floundered on a widespread inability to comprehend a German income tax form.
The machines, Bonn hopes, will provide an easy-to-understand system of taxation, the newspaper added. This is the first time tax tickets have been sold on the streets in Germany, it said.
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