Most of the small and medium-sized enterprises weathered the 2020 pandemic year better than feared.
According to a current analysis of several hundred thousand annual financial statements of the business customers of German savings banks by their association DSGV, 90 percent of the companies with annual sales up to a maximum of 250 million euros made a profit despite Corona.
Mark Fehr
Editor in business.
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The positive figures should not hide the fact that many entrepreneurs suffer from difficult regulatory framework conditions, which is mainly due to the high burden of taxes and bureaucracy. If you ask around in the middle class, the perception of the entrepreneur base is obviously very different from how top politicians see the situation.
Example: SPD Chancellor candidate Olaf Scholz claimed in the election campaign that no entrepreneur would leave Germany because of high taxes. The entrepreneur and FDP local politician Sarah Zickler is annoyed by this statement and explains why she sees it differently. "Many entrepreneurs only stay loyal to Germany out of pure love of their homeland," says Zickler, who runs a brokerage company in Reutlingen and is general secretary of the FDP Association of Liberal Medium-Sized Enterprises in Baden-Württemberg and a member of its federal executive board. Other entrepreneurs went to Poland or Romania or set up a holding company in Switzerland. According to Zickler, the main concern of small and medium-sized companies is the complicated tax law, the impending reintroduction of the wealth tax and the high level of bureaucracy.
This applies to sales tax, for example: only private individuals pay sales tax, but companies have to post it at great expense, even if they do business with other companies.
In domestic business transactions between companies, sales tax should therefore be waived, as is common in some European countries.
That would be a considerable relief, through which no tax revenue would be lost.
The special rules of trade tax also make life unnecessarily difficult for traders.
"Entrepreneurs want more medium-sized companies in politics and less politics in medium-sized companies," says Zickler.
Your party proposes a pragmatic solution to the bureaucracy problem: for every new regulation, two old regulations would have to be deleted.
Rules far removed from life
The bureaucracy burden on companies runs through all industries, as the entrepreneur and member of the Bundestag Alexander Kulitz (FDP) observes.
Taken in isolation, the problems look like isolated cases, which is why it is so difficult to create a broad awareness of the topic.
Overall, however, the numerous rules and requirements that were far from life paralyzed medium-sized businesses and the German economy.
“Even a craft business today cannot do without expensive tax advisors,” says Kulitz.
In view of the current polls for left-wing parties, numerous entrepreneurs rightly fear the reintroduction of a bureaucratic and economically damaging wealth tax.
And, according to him, worries about rising energy prices are compounded by fear of security of supply as a whole.
A representative study published on Wednesday by the University of Göttingen on behalf of the Association of Family Businesses Land and Forest shows that entrepreneurs' fear of a return of wealth tax is not exaggerated. A wealth tax with a tax rate of 1 percent may sound harmless, but according to the study, this would lead to the net income of the affected agricultural and forestry entrepreneurs falling by up to 54 percent.