By October 31, nearly 36 million properties will need to be revalued using owner information. Entrepreneurs and citizens must submit their property tax returns by then. Several large associations are now demanding an extension of the deadline, including the German Hotel and Restaurant Association (Dehoga) and the German Trade Association (HDE).
The deadline should be extended to 2023, but at least until December 31, 2022. The “Handelsblatt” reports on this.
The reason: The companies are already heavily burdened by the corona and energy crisis, writes the working group for medium-sized companies to Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner and the state finance ministers. Therefore bureaucracy should be avoided.
Furthermore, the working group explains that it is incomprehensible that it is still necessary to “submit a very complex property tax value declaration” by the said date. There is no nationwide database. Taxpayers have to get their data themselves from various government agencies.
The tax union and the Federal Chamber of Tax Advisors also warn of chaos, even of a “collapse of the tax offices”, if the deadline continues to end on October 31st. The tax offices are already suffering from a lack of staff, according to the chairman of the German Tax Union, Florian Kölbler. “The extension of the deadline must now come quickly. Otherwise, the tax offices are in danger of collapsing under the deadline extension requests,” says Kölbler. The staff could not cope with “laundry baskets by the number of deadline extensions”, he continues.
Experts are now expecting an extension. However, the Federal Ministry of Finance has not yet committed itself to this. Katja Hessel (FDP), Parliamentary State Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Finance, recently announced that the federal and state governments would jointly assess the situation in the property tax return at the end of September based on the data then available.
Citizens and companies have been able to submit their property tax returns since July 1st. By the end of August, however, only 15 percent had been received by the tax authorities. Several federal states had already complained that the feedback on the property tax return was rather slow. A spokesman for the Berlin Senate Finance Administration admitted that the proportion of responses was “manageable”. By last Wednesday, almost 125,000 declarations had been received. More than four times as much is expected.
The administration expects that by the end of the deadline there will be significantly more than the 2000 applications that are currently being received every day. “We are also prepared that some will not meet the deadline,” said the spokesman. Those affected would then be contacted. In Hesse, there were around 665,000 entries as of mid-September, Finance Minister Michael Boddenberg (CDU) reported on Tuesday in the Hessian state parliament in Wiesbaden. But there are 2.8 million plots.
From 2025, the property tax is to be recalculated.
