The tax authorities gave the owners of around 36 million properties, houses, condominiums and commercial space in Germany just four months to report their data for the new property tax.

The portal for this – part of the already established electronic tax return (acronym “Elster”) – has been online since July 1st.

But it is already said: Nothing works anymore.

Manfred Schäfers

Business correspondent in Berlin.

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Bastian Benrath

Editor in Business.

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Since the weekend, reports have been piling up that the new property tax return cannot be accessed – because the portal collapsed under the rush of citizens, many of whom apparently did not want to do the job at the last minute.

While the website was still open on Monday morning and "due to the enormous interest in the forms for the property tax reform" only current "restrictions on availability" were mentioned, the online tax office also closed completely during the course of the day.

Only a green construction site cone awaited visitors to the site.

The Bavarian State Office for Taxes, which programmed the portal for the whole of Germany, is responsible for the site.

At the weekend, "due to very high user requests of well over 100,000 simultaneous accesses", there were unfortunately temporary restrictions and disruptions in the availability of Elster, according to the Bavarian Ministry of Finance on Monday.

“We very much regret this.

A solution to the technical difficulties is being worked on at full speed.” The damage had already been done by then.

The citizens have four months, the state two years

The Internet is full of reports from complaining citizens who wanted to promptly comply with the new obligation imposed on them by the administration to submit a property tax return, but were unable to do so because of government IT problems.

The reason that citizens only have four months for the new tax return is due to the slowness of the administration.

Because citizens should declare their property by October 31 of this year, so that the new property tax can start on January 1, 2025 – in more than two years.

The financial authorities and local authorities have allowed themselves more time to prepare for the change.

The IT glitch reminds Marc Danneberg, Head of Public Administration at the digital association Bitkom, of the first corona wave.

Back then, schools across the country were collapsing their online platforms because they couldn't cope with all students and teachers accessing them at the same time.

Danneberg's analysis: Many public IT infrastructures in Germany manage normal operation, but collapse at peak loads.

"The IT in the German administration is no longer up to date," says the expert.

According to Danneberg, failures like this show that in the recent past the German state has concentrated primarily on offering new administrative services online, but has neglected the underlying infrastructure.