If you sublet your apartment via Internet platforms such as Airbnb, you must state the income in your tax return. The Hamburg tax authority has now received posting data for nationwide controls.
For control purposes, the Hamburg tax investigators have requested booking data from more than 56,000 providers on an international agency portal for private holiday accommodation. The total turnover amounts to more than one billion euros, as the financial authorities of the Hanseatic city announced today.
The collected data would now be forwarded to the responsible tax authorities in the federal states for further verification. According to information from the German Press Agency, the information requested is data from the US company Airbnb.
additional claims the tax offices
As early as 2020, Hamburg was able to obtain a court order to release the data as part of a so-called international group request. According to the authority, the evaluation of the sales of 8,000 German providers in the amount of 137 million dollars led to additional tax revenue of four million euros nationwide between 2021 and 2022.
For Hamburg alone, the additional claims would have been 706,000 euros for income tax and sales tax as well as 195,000 euros for culture and tourism tax.
declining tax income
The tenacity of the tax investigation paid off back then, according to Hamburg’s finance senator Andreas Dressel (SPD). “The renewed request for data means that untaxed rental income will be consistently uncovered.” For “tax dishonest” landlords, the risk of being discovered has increased significantly.
The last tax estimate that Dressel presented in May showed that Hamburg will collect less tax than expected in the coming years. The estimate for the years 2023 to 2027 was around 231 million euros lower than expected. Dressel said that was an order of magnitude “that it will now be difficult to manage in the coming years”.