The federal government does not manage to meet the deadline for the property tax return for its real estate.

This emerges from a response from the Federal Ministry of Finance to a question from CDU MP Christoph Ploß.

According to this, the majority of the properties that were transferred to the Federal Agency for Real Estate Tasks are exempt from property tax, but a declaration must still be submitted for these properties.

Manfred Schäfers

Business correspondent in Berlin.

  • Follow I follow

"The individual manual submission of around 26,000 property tax returns to a large number of different tax offices across Germany would be extremely time-consuming and inefficient," writes the Parliamentary State Secretary for Finance, Florian Toncar (FDP).

A disgrace to homeowners

That is why the decision was made in favor of an IT solution.

Data collection and data maintenance began in mid-2022.

The FDP politician announced that the first blocks of property tax returns will be sent in January 2023.

The Federal Agency is initially concentrating on the taxable properties.

According to plan, the reports for these should be completed by the end of March.

,

"The declaration submission for the real estate tax-exempt properties should begin at the same time, so that according to the current planning, the necessary declarations for the main determination for all properties of the Federal Agency for Real Estate Tasks should be completed by September 30, 2023." The magazine "Der Spiegel" is the first to open reported on his web page about writing Toncar.

The deadline for submitting the tax return, which was subsequently extended by three months, ends at the end of January.

"Millions of homeowners and tax consultants are forced to complete their property tax returns by the end of the month under high pressure and legal uncertainties," stressed Ploß, a member of the CDU.

"The responsible Ministry of Finance has not yet submitted a single tax return for its real estate," he criticized.

Giving the citizens a much too tight deadline, which not even their own administration can meet, is an impertinence towards the homeowners.