Many have never experienced anything like this – like the 53-year-old customer of a tax consultant.

For the last ten years, he has forwarded all the necessary documents for the income tax return to his advisor by the summer.

So far, the law firm has then prepared the declaration within a few weeks and sent it to the tax office well before the deadline.

But now everything is different.

The receipts were left unprocessed by the tax consultant for more than a year, and the declaration was only received by the tax authorities a few days after the deadline.

And that's not all: the wish to please help with the complicated property tax was answered by saying that you should try it yourself.

The reason for both: the tax consultant's work overload.

Dyrk Scherff

Editor in the “Value” section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sunday newspaper.

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Frank Urich from the Hessen Association of Tax Consultants and tax consultants himself knows such cases well enough.

They have become the norm.

"We can't keep up with work anymore, we're behind with everything.

Income tax returns and annual financial statements are at least three to nine months late compared to before." Worse still: "Some tax consultants even have to give notice to long-standing regular customers in exceptional cases because they can no longer manage it." Anyone looking for a new consultant is hit even harder, he doesn't find any at all.

“We have to turn down new clients because we can no longer look after them well.

This had never happened before the Corona pandemic.

And almost all my colleagues do the same.”

It seems to affect almost all law firms.

"This applies to small and large and to those in big cities or in rural areas," says Hartmut Schwab, President of the Federal Chamber of Tax Advisors.

At best, the big law firms have the advantage that they can redistribute the work internally, but they are also overburdened.

Tax consultants like to complain that they have a lot to do.

But since the beginning of the pandemic, the work has indeed multiplied and the consequences are still being felt negatively today.

New burdens such as property tax and some changes in the law were also added.

Corona aid overloads tax consultants

It all started with the Corona bridging aid for the self-employed and companies.

Since the initial emergency aid was susceptible to fraud, the following state support should be examined more closely to determine whether there was any entitlement to aid at all.

So-called “testing third parties” should take over this.

These were lawyers, auditors and, of course, tax consultants who knew the balance sheets of the companies better.

You should submit the applications.

The majority of medium-sized companies turned to the tax consultants because everyone had one anyway.

The result: A huge flood of Corona aid applications rolled towards the industry.

It may be over now, but it still has repercussions today.

Because now the "final accounts" for the bridging aid are due.

They must be handed in by the end of June.

In this way, the companies prove that they really needed the amount of support granted.

The aim is, of course, to avoid repayments.

The short-time allowance must now also be settled.

To do this, the tax consultants sometimes still have to manually sift through individual pay slips from employees because smaller companies have not processed them digitally - an effort, by the way, that not only costs a lot of time, but also money for the tax consultant,

which is not reimbursed to entrepreneurs by the state.

The final accounts for the “restart aid” have to be submitted by the end of March.