Millions of property owners have to fill out a property tax return.
(Photo: dpa)
Berlin The deadline for the property tax return has been extended once until January 31, 2023. The Handelsblatt learned this from government and state circles. The federal and state governments agreed on this on Thursday. So far, the deadline was October 31, 2022.
The extension of the deadline is intended to relieve both citizens and companies as well as the tax offices. In this way, one wants to ensure that citizens and companies are not overwhelmed with procedures for late property tax returns in times of crisis. The federal and state governments also feared that the tax offices would be overwhelmed with countless requests for extensions of deadlines.
After a ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court, the federal and state governments agreed on a reform of the property tax in 2019. Therefore, all property owners in Germany must submit a property tax return this year. The federal and state governments had originally set a four-month period for this, which ran from July 1st to October 31st of this year. However, according to surveys, only 20 percent of all tax returns have been received by the tax offices so far – three weeks before the deadline.
One reason for this: the taxpayers have to collect the necessary documents themselves from the state authorities. In addition, there are different property tax models depending on the federal state as a result of the reform. This makes the tax return quite complicated, experts complain.
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In some federal states, the taxpayers were not even written to. Many taxpayers may not even know they have to file a declaration, or by when.
Property tax: federal states skeptical about ridge extension
The Federal Chamber of Tax Advisors, the Federal Tax Union and most recently the Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner (FDP) had therefore spoken out in favor of an extension of the deadline. However, many federal states were skeptical about this in the run-up to the meeting with the federal government.
The tax offices needed enough time to process the expected 36 million declarations. And when this happened, the municipalities needed sufficient time to adjust the municipal assessment rates for the property tax as planned.
Politicians accept that some property owners will have to pay higher property taxes in the future. The bottom line is that the reform should be revenue-neutral, i.e. not bring in more or less taxes. The property tax currently flushes 15 billion euros into the coffers of the municipalities every year. The reform is to come into force on January 1, 2025.
Experts had recently warned that sticking to the previous deadline would lead to great chaos. The head of the tax union, Florian Köbler, said that the tax offices would “collapse” completely if every single taxpayer had to send a reminder by letter.
Some federal states such as Baden-Württemberg are already using pragmatic solutions. Even before the federal and state governments reached an agreement, the state had decided not to send taxpayers there a reminder from the tax office until January. In other words: Anyone who had taken their time, despite the fact that the deadline was actually at the end of October, would not have to expect a fine.
More: You want to avoid these ten mistakes when making property taxes