In contrast to Bavaria, NRW has not extended the deadline for property tax returns. The tax offices now want to inform defaulting property owners of the consequences. There is not only a debate about the end of the deadline, but also about the notifications.
Düsseldorf (dpa / lnw) – The tax offices in North Rhine-Westphalia want to write to defaulting property owners if property tax returns are not submitted on time and point out the possible consequences. After the deadline, the tax offices would take the next steps, a spokesman for the North Rhine-Westphalia regional finance department told the German Press Agency. A letter was sent to remind the applicant that the declaration had to be submitted, and it was also pointed out that in the event of non-submission, surcharges for delays and penalties were possible. If the defaulting owners do not react then, the tax offices would have to estimate the tax bases.
In contrast to Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia did not extend the deadline for property tax returns. “The deadline for submitting the property tax return in North Rhine-Westphalia ends today, January 31, 2023,” said a spokesman for the North Rhine-Westphalia Ministry of Finance on Tuesday at the request of the German Press Agency. Shortly before, it had become known in Munich that the Free State was going it alone to extend the deadline. Property owners should have three months more time, i.e. until the end of April, as Bavarian Finance Minister Albert Füracker (CSU) said on Tuesday after a cabinet meeting.
The homeowners association
According to data from the Oberfinanzdirektion (OFD), around 6.7 million properties and businesses in agriculture and forestry in NRW have to be revalued due to the property tax reform. As of Tuesday, around 4.5 million declarations had been received by the NRW tax offices. That corresponds to 66 percent. Experience has shown that deadlines are often used as far as possible. That is also shown here. The spokesman reported a “final delivery sprint”. The number of deliveries would have increased sixfold compared to December 2022.
Anyone who has submitted the property tax return will receive the property tax value and the property tax assessment notice from the tax office. Due to these two decisions, no payment has yet to be made, explained the spokesman for the OFD NRW. According to the authorities, the property tax value recalculated by the tax authorities and the property tax amount are not yet meaningful for the property tax to be paid. They served the respective municipality as a basis for determining the property tax. In the coming year, the municipalities would first set the new assessment rates and use them to calculate the property tax to be paid. According to the information, property tax payments under the new law must then be made from January 1, 2025.
The submission deadline for the property tax return had already been extended from the end of October 2022 to the end of January 2023 due to the slow receipt from the federal states. From 2025, the new property tax calculation should 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. Property tax is one of the most important sources of income for municipalities. According to the OFD, property tax assessments and property tax assessments have been sent to property owners in NRW since September who submitted a declaration early on.
An alliance of associations has meanwhile called on the federal states to provisionally issue the notices for determining the property tax value. A number of objections and lawsuits are already pending, which, due to constitutional concerns, have again been directed against the calculation methods of the new property tax, according to a statement published on Monday by the Federal Taxpayers’ Association and the German Tax Union, among others. The declared goal of the associations is therefore to prevent a wave of objections. In NRW, too, an alliance of associations called on Finance Minister Marcus Optendrenk (CDU) on Monday to ensure that the decisions to determine the property tax value are provisional.
