display

Wiesbaden (dpa / lhe) - funeral and garbage fees or dog and trade tax: Hesse's citizens are sometimes in the chalk with their municipalities because they have not paid taxes.

It's all in the millions.

If citizens do not pay their taxes and duties or pay them slowly, then this places an additional burden on the often indebted cities and communities.

Municipalities can initially respond with reminders - according to the Hessian Association of Towns and Municipalities, they also have the option of deferring outstanding payments or obtaining foreclosures.

According to its own information, the city of Frankfurt was missing a total of more than 160 million euros in trade tax, around 1.8 million euros in property tax and 700,000 euros in dog tax at the end of 2019.

display

Many citizens avoided administrative fees, for example for driving licenses and building permits, said the spokesman for the Kassel district, Harald Kühlborn.

But also waste and cemetery fees as well as fines and penalty payments are often simply not paid, said the spokeswoman for the district of Giessen, Louisa Wehlitz.

In the social sector, too, there is often a lack of reimbursements for advance maintenance payments or repayments of transfer payments, for example unemployment benefit II or basic security in old age.

Cities and municipalities rarely learn the exact reasons for the sometimes poor payment behavior of their citizens.

"If we get knowledge of the reasons, then only if, for example, an application for payment in installments is made or a foreclosure is carried out," said Wehlitz.

"In most cases, these are debtors with low incomes or large mountains of debt."

The same applies to the district of Kassel.

Around 20,000 outstanding receivables were outstanding there by the end of 2019, as Kühlborn explained.

The district alone lacked 800,000 euros in fees for driving licenses, building permits and accommodation in shared accommodation.

Another 200,000 euros in claims from services such as school care, dunning fees and compensation are also outstanding.

The lion's share of the total of more than four million euros that private individuals owed the Kassel district at the end of last year came from the social sector, said Kühlborn.

Some of the claims are also several years old, so the district must assume that it will not get its money back.

The exact amount of debt of the citizens can often not be precisely determined, however, since the financial programs used in the municipalities cannot differentiate, for example, between private individuals and companies or associations.

display

In addition to the legally required property and trade taxes, the cities and municipalities can also optionally levy so-called “small municipal taxes”.

These include dog, beverage or amusement taxes, as Alexandra Rauscher from the Association of Cities and Towns explained.

Fees and contributions, for example for water and garbage, also go directly to the municipalities in most cases.

By means of the so-called district levy, some of the income flows to the districts to cover their financial needs.