Owners of land and buildings take their time submitting the required property tax return. After 20 days, around 1.6 million declarations were received nationwide. That’s not even five percent of the tax returns required for the property tax reform.
The first countries are no longer ruling out an extension of the submission deadline beyond October. These are the results of a survey conducted by WELT AM SONNTAG at the Federal Ministry of Finance, the finance ministries of the federal states and the Bavarian State Office for Taxes, which is responsible for the Elster platform.
According to the Bavarian State Tax Office, 1,565,447 property tax returns were submitted electronically nationwide from July 1 to July 20. This also includes the 30,351 declarations that did not come in directly via Elster, but rather via the Federal Ministry of Finance’s “Property tax return for private property” portal.
In addition, there is an uncounted number of declarations that have been created in paper form in most countries. It turns out that this proportion is small. From Lower Saxony it was said that “over 97 percent” of the declarations were received via Elster.
According to the 16 state finance ministries, 38 million economic units have to be revalued to WELT AM SONNTAG. In addition to land, houses and apartments, this can also be agricultural and forestry operations.
The pace of the first 20 days with an average of 80,000 declarations per day is not enough to have all declarations by October 31st. A daily average of 310,000 declarations would have been necessary over the four months. Without a significant increase in the remaining 100 days, only ten million declarations were available by the end of October, and thus less than a third of the total.
“We are not fundamentally closing ourselves off to a debate about extending the deadline,” said the ministry in Baden-Württemberg. In Bavaria and Lower Saxony, too, people do not want to generally refuse such a discussion, but consider the time to be too early.
However, the majority of countries rule out a general extension. It is pointed out there that the processing of the property tax returns by the tax offices must be largely completed by the end of 2023 in order to give the municipalities enough time to determine the new assessment rates that will apply from 2025.
“So that the revaluation and the determination of the new property tax can be completed on time, the tax offices and ultimately also the municipalities are dependent on a timely receipt of the declaration,” said the Saxon State Ministry of Finance, for example.
No taxpayer has to fear anything if the tax is not submitted by the end of October. The tax offices waive late surcharges. From Schleswig-Holstein, for example, it was said that taxpayers would first be reminded of their tax obligation by a further letter.
