Pandemic programs, new property tax, annual financial statements – the guild of tax advisors warns of overload and sends a call for help to politicians.
Berlin The government has launched numerous aid programs for companies and the self-employed who have got into financial difficulties due to the corona pandemic. The final bill will soon be due. But the details are still largely unclear here. This is not only critical for the entrepreneurs who are threatened with repayment of aid money. The tax advisors entrusted with the specific processing of the programs are also at their limit. “In addition to everyday business such as tax returns, annual financial statements and payroll accounting, this is all an enormous amount of work, with the same staffing levels,” said the President of the Federal Chamber of Tax Advisors (BStBK), Hartmut Schwab, the Handelsblatt. “Basically, all of this can hardly be achieved.” He demands that tax advisors not be burdened unnecessarily in this “tense situation”. The final billing of the Corona aid must be “simple, unbureaucratic and legally secure”.
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Aspects of state aid also play a role
If a company has made use of payments from several programs, each of the different programs must be taken into account in the final settlement. This also includes aspects of state aid law. Overall, the company may not exceed the funding amount to which it is fundamentally entitled. Repayments or back payments can be made, emphasized the Federal Ministry of Economics – “depending on the costs actually incurred and the collapse in sales suffered”. The final accounts must therefore be submitted by June 30, 2022. The final accounting procedure is currently being designed for the bridging aid as well as the November and December aid. According to the ministry, the final accounts for the first aid programs can probably be submitted electronically in December 2021. In addition, a summarized submission of the final accounts for the various program lines is planned, “in order to enable efficient processing for the auditing third parties and approval bodies”.
Chamber President Schwab demands: “Content regulations must be established at an early stage and must not be changed afterwards.” The state IT infrastructure must be stable and function flawlessly from the start. In addition, it must be possible in the final settlement to subsequently correct requested aid without restriction – for example if applications were made incorrectly because there were uncertainties about the program specifications or the law on aid. This is also about liability risks for tax advisors.
Tax advisors consider deadlines to be utopian
Above all, the Federal Chamber of Tax Advisors considers the deadline to be utopian. Because there is an enormous volume of work in the law firms anyway: ongoing bookkeeping, advice, short-time work allowance, the 2020 tax returns as well as the disclosure of the annual financial statements and the property tax returns compete with the time-consuming Corona assistance. The Chamber is of the opinion that the deadline for the final account must be extended by at least six months. In addition, the already extended deadline for filing annual tax returns 2020 for tax advisors must be extended by a further three months until the end of August 2021. The same applies to the disclosure of the 2020 annual financial statements in order to “straighten out” everything a little. In addition the situation is made more difficult by the reformed property tax . “It will be a huge feat,” explains BStBK President Schwab. “In order to be able to recalculate the property tax, more than 35 million real estate units have to be revalued.” For taxpayers and their advisors this means: get data and prepare documents. The tax authorities currently provide that the declarations of assessment for the property values must be submitted electronically between July 1, 2022 and October 31, 2022. Here, BStBK President Schwab sees a “blatant disproportion” in the processing time allowed: “Taxpayers have to bring everything in within four months, the administration has more than 24 months for further processing.” Here, too, the Chamber advocates an extension of the deadline. Schwab sees the demands for his guild as justified: “For almost a year and a half, the tax consultants have been looking after their clients with Corona aid and this under enormous time pressure and with a lot of legal ambiguities.” That helps significantly to “keep the economy afloat”. Current economic data show that this is successful: The feared wave of insolvency among medium-sized companies has not materialized. More: Like tax offices and tax investigators Corona – Want to track down fraud
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