"Confusion, XXL bureaucracy": Taxpayers' Association calculates with property tax - and calls for a longer deadline
Created: 08/22/2022, 21:00
By: Patricia Huber
The property tax return causes frustration for many owners.
In view of this, the taxpayers' association is pushing for clear simplifications.
Berlin/Munich – From 2023 there should be a new property tax calculation.
However, before this can be collected, around 36 million properties in Germany have to be revalued.
For landowners, this means a lot of work.
Because the property tax return is complicated - and many already despair of it.
Property tax return requires “time, effort and strong nerves”
Daniela Karbe-Gessler, head of the tax department at the Taxpayers' Association (BdSt), knows how much property owners have to struggle with the new tax return.
"The submission of the property tax return requires time, effort and strong nerves from many owners," she explained to
Merkur.de
on Monday .
A particularly big problem is that many owners have to provide information that they often do not even have.
"Because this was to be expected, we, as the taxpayers' association, demanded in advance that the tax authorities insert the data they knew into the declarations themselves," says Karbe-Gessler.
However, the federal government did not comply with this requirement, which often leads to problems for those affected when filling out the declaration.
The property tax return causes frustration for many owners.
© IMAGO/Rolf Kosecki
Property tax: Significantly extend the submission deadline
Because each federal state requires different information from the landowners, there is a “muddle” nationwide, the tax expert complains.
Owners are threatened with “XXL bureaucracy”.
It becomes particularly tricky for those owners who have property in different federal states.
For the bureaucratic jumble, it definitely takes one thing: time.
But those affected don’t really have much time to deal with the tax return in detail.
The already tight deadline ends on October 31st.
So far, however, the tax rate has barely reached ten percent in most federal states, which is why Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) is already considering an extension.
Daniela Karbe-Gessler is also in favor of this.
The “much too short period of time for submitting the declaration of determination must be measured more generously – in any case by the end of January 2023.”
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Property tax: Merge existing authority data
However, it is questionable whether that is enough to make it easier for the owners.
In order to make it easier for those affected to obtain tax information, the BdSt advocates a better exchange of information between the authorities: For this purpose, one could, for example, "coordinate databases from land register, building and cadastral offices as well as financial administrations or - at least - make the data from them retrievable".
It is incomprehensible why citizens would have to enter the relevant data again if they already existed anyway.
The tax expert also demands that the relevant software, in this case the Elster tax portal, must function reliably.
Error messages are sometimes triggered there that are hardly understandable for the user.
There is a need for improvement here.
In addition, the financial administration should make it much easier to fill out the declaration on paper.
Many older people do not find their way around the digital system.
Corresponding forms for property tax should therefore be provided without justification.
(ph)