Status: 01/23/2023 09:16 a.m
Owners only have one week to submit their property tax returns. Tax offices and citizens’ offices are overrun with questions. The main message is: “Get started now” – if necessary with “courage to leave gaps”.
In mid-January at the Angermünde tax office: Brigitte Matthes leafs through the forms. She actually wanted to submit her property tax return digitally. She and her brother-in-law own a property of a former LPG, an agricultural production cooperative in Criewen, Brandenburg. However, they were simply overwhelmed by the large number of numbers and data that the online form requested for their case.
“Land register page, parcel counter, parcel denominator, area in square meters – well, we know that. There are so many things that I don’t know,” says Matthes. Now she sits in the citizens’ office of the tax office; that’s what the agency set up to help landowners like Mattes. January 31 is the deadline for submitting the property tax return.
Questions about the district, standard land value, application reference number
In Brandenburg, more than 680,000 declarations were received by the tax offices, according to the state finance ministry. This corresponds to a rate of a good 54 percent. Nationwide, the rate was just under 57.4 percent, according to estimates from the Federal Ministry of Finance last week.
In the citizens’ office of the tax office in Angermünde, employees like Tom Diebetz patiently explain again and again how the forms have to be filled out. There is a final sprint mood. A young editor reports on consulting assignments without a break. “You still have someone sitting in here, you try to help him, then you’re done with that, and then the next one comes right away.”
Ivonne Junghans is sitting one floor up, black headset on her ears, microphone in front of her mouth, looking at the two monitors on the desk in front of her. Concentrated and determined, she asks: “Do you happen to have your field number and your field piece number at hand?” Two months ago there wasn’t that much going on here on the service hotline of the Angermünde tax office. Now the line is busy almost all the time, says Junghans. “We have taxpayers who sometimes wait 45 minutes. And usually they all have almost the same questions. For example: the division of the parcel into numerator and denominator, or questions about the district, questions about the standard land value, the application number and so on and so on right away.”
“A lot of technical jargon on tax law”
So many questions so close to the deadline – hasn’t enough been explained? “Yes, definitely,” says the Haus & Grund owners’ and landlords’ association. The financial administrations of the federal states had only gradually built up information portals for the citizens and in quite different quality. And “offline” was “poorly or not at all” informed, with the exception of a few committed tax offices. In addition, “a lot of technical jargon from real estate and tax law” and the length of the forms unsettled many.
The association advises simply getting started if you have not yet submitted your declaration – “with the courage to leave gaps” and, if necessary, in paper form. Special features of your own case could also be presented better.
“Get started now”, advises the Federal Chamber of Tax Advisors, in order not to risk sanctions or an estimate of the property tax by the tax authorities. In principle, the deadline for the property tax return was “much too short”, the tax consultants criticize; they are asking for an extension until the end of May. “Taxpayers and consultants must now take over the work of the administration,” criticizes the President of the Federal Chamber of Tax Consultants, Hartmut Schwab. “That is unfortunate. I hope that this effort will be worthwhile and that a database will now be created that can be used for the next main assessment.”
Time is also short for tax offices
In the state of Brandenburg, information was provided very extensively and early on, according to the local Ministry of Finance: owners had been written to, and the tax offices had offered information events in more than 40 municipalities. There is also ongoing information on the website of the state financial administration and on a separate telephone hotline. There are also “step-by-step instructions” on the Ministry of Finance’s website. The Federal Ministry of Finance refers, among other things, to the transnational website www.grundsteuerreform.de.
Among the property tax returns submitted, there are probably still a number of errors or incomplete, including in Angermünde. The employees then have to make phone calls, says Annabelle Siedschlag: “Of course, mistakes happen to everyone, that’s human. That’s not a big deal. The phone calls are often short, you call and say: ‘It was here’. And you gets his answer relatively quickly. But it would be easier to process it if everything was already there.”
There is no deadline for tax officials as there is for taxpayers. But time is of the essence for them too: the aim is for the tax offices to have revalued the properties in accordance with the reform by mid-2024, according to Brandenburg’s Ministry of Finance. The property tax is very important for the municipalities because they use it to finance daycare centers, schools, libraries and roads. From 2025, cities and municipalities should be able to levy the new property tax. Nine new employees were therefore hired in Angermünde in Brandenburg.