Düsseldorf (dpa/lnw) – After the sluggish return of property tax returns, a wave of objections from affected citizens is now rolling towards the NRW tax offices. By the end of the submission deadline on January 31, the tax authorities had already received around 187,000 objections to notifications issued up to that point. This is reported by the “Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung” (“WAZ”/Thursday), citing a response from the North Rhine-Westphalia Ministry of Finance to a request from the FDP parliamentary group.
124,000 objections related to the valuation of the property, a further 63,000 were directed against the tax base set by the tax authorities. In addition to the municipal assessment rates, both values ??are decisive levers for the actual amount of property tax that has to be paid from 2025.
Consumer advocates and homeowners’ associations had advised landowners to formally object to the decisions. The opposition state parliament FDP called for all property tax assessments to be subject to a review. According to information from the Oberfinanzdirektion NRW, however, there are no legal requirements for declaring the tax assessments to be provisional.
As of February 22, the NRW tax offices were still missing around 1.7 million real estate tax returns from defaulting real estate owners. Due to the property tax reform, around 6.7 million plots of land and farms and forestry businesses in NRW have to be revalued.
