The property tax does not come from the negative headlines: For months, the tax returns that all property owners had to fill out until then and who had their trouble with it were annoying. And since then, the notices that the tax offices have created on the basis of these declarations and send to the citizens have caused a stir. This is because the properties were often valued much higher than before. This increases the fear of a significant increase in property tax.
Dyrk Scherff
Editor in the "Value" section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.
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Many citizens reacted to this by objecting to the decision. And what began hesitantly has turned into a big wave. "The vast majority of our clients are now appealing against the property tax assessments," says Heinrich Fleischer, partner and tax advisor at the auditing firm EY. There are now more than three million appeals to the tax offices – with a total of more than 30 million property tax returns submitted. The authorities are increasingly overwhelmed by this. "We have redeployed internal staff in order to be able to cope with the high number of appeals," says Holger Kriebel, deputy head of the Mainz tax office, for example. "Objections claiming the unconstitutionality of the property tax law have been suspended." This means that they will no longer be processed until a court has ruled on them – in the end, in a few years, probably the Federal Constitutional Court. The decision remains provisional and does not become binding.
By mid-May, nine lawsuits had already been filed before the tax courts. Because there is some criticism of the new rules. Some experts complain that in some cases too much is charged as a lump sum, such as the net cold rent and the land value. And individual circumstances such as building burdens or requirements of monument protection would not be taken into account. The possibility of proving a lower value of the property or land with an appraisal exists only in Baden-Württemberg, is also a criticism.
Appeals will not be processed
Mainz's approach is no exception. It is now common practice in Germany. If an objection casts doubt on the constitutionality of the property tax, the procedure is suspended, but taxpayers are often not informed. "As far as we know, this now seems to be the case in most federal states," says tax consultant Fleischer. Individual states, such as Brandenburg, have even publicly announced this. The behavior of the tax offices in Hesse, Hamburg and Lower Saxony, where no lawsuits have yet been filed, is still unclear. When asked, the Taxpayers' Association also confirms the tendency for appeals to be increasingly dormant. He supports this and advocates the automatic provisionality of all decisions so that most appeals are no longer necessary.
Apparently, only appeals that challenge specific information in the notice, such as the areas on which it is based or standard land values, are processed in the tax offices. But there, too, a lot is likely to be left undone. The tax offices also want to protect themselves. Because every rejected objection can lead to further lawsuits, which then make a lot of work. At the same time, the tax offices are already heavily overloaded - as an after-effect of the Corona aid, the energy aid and the normal processing of the millions of property tax returns. "We had to hire new staff especially for the processing of property tax," says Holger Kriebel from the Mainz tax office.