The deadline for filing property tax returns is January.

A good two-thirds submitted their data on time.

What about the rest?

Manfred Schaefers

Business correspondent in Berlin.

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Now the tax offices are sending out reminders.

Taxpayers are thus officially notified of the expiration of the deadline.

Because property tax is not a regular tax like income tax, I don't expect individual tax authorities to impose surcharges immediately.

Bavaria has just announced that it will extend the deadline by another three months in Bavaria.

Won't other federal states follow suit?

I do not hope so.

I am not aware of any other federal states that are planning something similar.

A grace period doesn't really help either.

No tax return is finished by waiting.

A colleague reports that her tax advisor advised her to appeal in any case when the first decision came.

Do many do that?

Unfortunately that's how it is.

This extends from the federal model to the deviating state laws.

Again, there are constitutional concerns.

At the end of the day, the courts will decide.

The tax consultants recommend their clients to file an objection in order to have the greatest possible legal protection.

The objection is then usually put on hold.

But that is only possible when a procedure has reached the highest courts.

And now the tax offices are drowning in objections?

Yes, that's why the tax offices should add a provisional note to all property tax assessments as soon as possible.

Otherwise we won't be able to keep up with the work.

The tax union, together with the taxpayers' association and other associations, called on the state finance ministers to only send property tax assessments with a provisional note.

Are there already signals that the message has arrived?

The message certainly got through.

Legally, however, it is not easy.

There are countries in which the requirements for a provisional notice are already in place.

So far, however, only one lawsuit has been announced for the federal model.

Nevertheless, political talks are already going on in the background about what to do with the mass objections.

With our initiative, we want to sensitize politicians to issue the notices provisionally as soon as possible in order to keep a wave of objections away from the tax offices and to protect all citizens and not just those who are well advised and who lodge an objection.

How many tax officials actually take care of the property tax?

That's hard to say because it starts with the programmers of the software and ends with the people who sit in the service centers and rating agencies.

There are also temporary staff who, for example, work on the telephone hotlines or do administrative work.

Do the submitted declarations only run through the system – with one or the other sample?

Or is each one handled by an employee?

The wish is that as much as possible is processed automatically.

Instead, the explanation runs through the computer, and a risk filter filters out problem cases.

However, the past few months have shown that the declarations that were not sent electronically are prone to errors.

Such cases have to be processed manually, so documents have to be requested.

This is holding up the people in the tax offices enormously, which in turn is to the detriment of other areas.

I'm thinking of audits, for example.

Tax justice suffers as a result.

Have we made life unnecessarily difficult for ourselves?

Why can't a garage be taxed at a flat rate, for example?