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Row of houses in Stuttgart
Photo: Sebastian Gollnow / DPA
Due to the real estate tax reform, the tax offices will probably have to deal with enormous additional work by processing objections against the revaluation of real estate.
Based on previous figures from the state authorities, according to the Finanztip portal, it can be assumed that around 1.5 million owners will take action against their decision.
The tax offices could be overstretched in terms of personnel.
At the beginning of February, the objections against property tax assessments that had already been received by the state authorities were queried for the purpose of the survey.
13 of the 16 countries provided corresponding information.
According to this, at least 350,000 such procedures have been conducted.
According to Finanztip, the objection rate in relation to the processed property tax returns ranges from 1.29 percent in Schleswig-Holstein to an estimated ten percent in Berlin and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
Bremen, Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia did not provide any information.
According to Finanztip, around nine million of 36 million property tax returns had been processed by the beginning of February.
"If you extrapolate the figures available to us, it becomes clear what a gigantic wave of objections the tax offices will face as soon as they have sent out the remaining majority of the property tax assessments," said Finanztip tax expert Jörg Leine.
Even if the staff in the authorities has been increased: in the past few years, the officials have processed an average of a little more than three million objections per year - in relation to this, 1.5 million additional objections are enormous.
In the course of the property tax reform, millions of properties nationwide have to be revalued.
Owners of houses, apartments and land must submit a number of data for the declaration.
Then the notifications will be sent.
The deadline for submitting the declaration expired at the end of January.
By then, however, every fourth declaration was still missing.
This also creates extra work for the tax authorities: in the coming weeks they will have to take care of sending millions of reminders to defaulting owners.
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