There are no limits to the wealth of ideas in tax structuring. The normal taxpayer does not realize this by looking at his own tax assessment, which often contains rather gloomy news. This is particularly evident when studying the relevant press. A number of banks have held up their hands with the tax authorities in recent years and collected tax refunds even though they were not entitled to them. Incidentally, from a legal point of view, there is definitely a difference between whether this happened in stock transactions with or without dividend entitlements. Cum-ex and cum-cum deals are all too often lumped together in the public debate and labeled with the legally absurd term of “tax robbery”.
But these are casualness compared to the nonchalance with which the state allowed systematic tax evasion on a large scale for years and now only half-heartedly takes care of the criminal and financial processing. It starts with the fact that the whole dimension of trickery is still completely unclear. With a verve that is sometimes less, sometimes more pronounced, the federal states are demanding back millions of sums that banks have pulled out of their pockets through these dubious deals. But there is still no reliable overview of how great the damage will be for the tax authorities. Instead, a Mannheim finance professor and his team strive to grasp the full extent of the problem with the help of calculations and assumptions. How accurate these arehowever nobody knows.
Of course, it is by no means trivial to determine the damage of such dubious tax transactions, but unlike the classic tax evasion, the tax authorities were even involved in the fraud.
Not only in times of tight budgets it should be a matter of course for the state to obtain a comprehensive overview.
The state should also give the same attention to tax debtors to cum-ex actors.
What the Finance Minister Olaf Scholz missed, a Federal Chancellor Scholz must finally tackle.