Owners of land, apartments and houses have more time to submit the required property tax return. The state finance ministers are giving them a postponement.
Berlin/Schwerin (dpa/mv) – The extension of the submission deadline for the new property tax returns has met with a positive response in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. “It is a good and right decision that citizens are given more time to process their applications,” said Finance Minister Heiko Geue (SPD) on Thursday after consultations with federal and state department heads. It is gratifying that the federal states, together with the Federal Ministry of Finance, have agreed on a nationwide extension of the deadline. This was important to him from the start.
According to Geue, the tax offices in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania currently only have around 218,000 electronic declarations. This results in an entry rate of around 25 percent. However, the non-digitized paper declarations available in the tax offices are not yet included.
Due to the sluggish receipt of property tax returns nationwide, the ministers agreed to extend the submission deadline once until the end of January 2023. It was originally supposed to expire at the end of October. Owners of land, houses and apartments have been able to submit declarations online since July 1st. However, according to the latest information, not even one in three house and apartment owners nationwide has already done so.
With the extension of the deadline that has now been decided, reason prevailed in the end, said FDP parliamentary group leader René Domke. “You can’t give the citizens a much too tight deadline of just four months, while politics and administration have not carried out a main determination for decades, although there was a legal obligation to do so,” he explained. Martin Schmidt from the AfD parliamentary group also welcomed the extension of the deadline. “It is gratifying that Finance Minister Dr. Geue has finally come to his senses and has agreed to the extension of the deadline. It has taken long enough,” said Schmidt. At the beginning of September, Geue did not see a problem in the low sales quota. Even then, there was justified criticism of the deadline from taxpayers, consumer advocates and tax consultants.
According to Andreas Breitner, director of the Association of North German Housing Companies (VNW), millions of Germans can breathe a sigh of relief. The extension of the deadline was a logical decision. “It is not surprising that problems are being reported from Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in particular. Both federal states have opted for the complicated and bureaucratic federal solution against the advice of experts,” explained Breitner. The homeowners would now have to pay for the consequences. They should now get as much help as possible so that they can fill out the property tax return.
From 2025, the new property tax calculation will apply. The Federal Constitutional Court had demanded this, because the tax offices recently calculated the value of a property on the basis of completely outdated data, from 1935 in East Germany and from 1964 in West Germany. Almost 36 million properties now have to be revalued for the recalculation.
