Spitting tacks

Last year was a year to remember. The war in the Ukraine. The death of Queen Elizabeth II. Deadly human-rights protests in Iran. Corona finally beginning to loosen its grasp. And earth-shaking tax reform in Germany.

Well, maybe not earth-shaking, but at least earthy insofar as it had to do with property …

The backstory is that in 2018, the Federal Constitutional Court in Germany declared that the law governing property tax was invalid and had to be updated. The problem was that the law was based on data and calculations from either 1964 (former West Germany) or 1935 (former East Germany, presumably because the Wall meant that nothing in East Germany could be updated until 1989) and so was hideously out of date. As such, identical, neighbouring buildings could have wildly different property values because of the vagaries of the real-estate market and the even bigger vagaries of the municipal assessment offices. This effectively amounted to discrimination, something that is thankfully illegal according to the German constitution.

(Now, if you think that’s all kind of silly, then let’s talk about parking spots. This being Germany, the allowed sizes of them have been written into law since at least 1939, the relevant one being some variation on the word Garagenverordnungen (“garage ordinance”) and “helpfully”, if variably, shortened to any of GarVO, GaVO, or GaStellV. Now, when my apartment building was built in 1998, the ordinance in power at the time specified a minimum width of 2.3 m for a parking spot. The problem is that my 2013 Nissan Note is about 1.7 m wide without the mirrors, leaving about 30 cm on each side when it’s parked. For reference, I’m slightly less than 40 cm wide and about 30 cm “deep”, making it a real squeeze to even get to the car door I can’t open. And, according to the British site buyacar, my Note is only average in width. (As am I too, according to anthropometrics.) Worse yet, a quarter of a century later, those exact same specifications are still being used in the Garagenverordnung currently in force in Not-Bielefeld.)

Anyway, 2022 was the chosen year to end homeowner discrimination in Germany. The solution was simple: update the database. And the method was even more elegant: get all the property owners to do it!

Fortunately, there were any number of people willing to help out with this daunting task. For instance, in my case, it included my tax accountant, the property-management company overseeing my building, and even the ex-tax accountant of my ex-wife. Why all the unsolicited generosity? Ah, there was money to be made here you see, namely about 200 EUR for the service.

Probably unbeknownst to most, however, is that it wasn’t so much of a service as a ripoff, with even the German Ministry of Finance saying that the whole process was relatively easy to accomplish. All the data that were needed for this process were

• the contact data of the owner(s),
• the surface area of the entire property,
• the percent of the property owned,
• the year of construction of your building on the property,
• the surface area of your house / apartment,
• the number of garage parking places (presumably according to the current GarVO, GaVO, or GaStellV and not reality),
• the entry number of the property in the land registry,
• the tax or reference number of the property, and
• the ground value of the property.

Only the last three of these were perhaps slightly more difficult to get, with most of the rest being spelled out in the purchase contract and/or basic data about the building that you should have gotten when buying it. (“Most” meaning that you should really know your own contact details, even if it too was in the same documents.) And, to get as far as getting a purchase contract, you had to update the entry for the property in the land registry first. And, once you know that entry number (which you need to update the entry), there were websites set up by the government to give you the last two values.

So definitely not no work, but definitely not 200 EUR worth either because it probably involved only about 15-20 minutes for those who knew how it all worked and got the necessary data from you in the first place. (Or about three plus hours for me who didn’t, most of which involved trying to understand and navigate the government’s tax website with its arcane language and finicky forms to input all the data.) In any case, I managed it and forgot completely about it until the official confirmation / new assessment arrived in the mail the other day …

… in Croatia.

Ah yes. It seems that I made a(t least one) slight mistake in filling out the forms and flipped the addresses of my wife and I. Thus the assessment was addressed and mailed to her with a note that it should be brought to my attention. (So, yes, I did know my contact details, I just didn’t know how to enter them properly. Interestingly, had I gotten her address wrong, the undeliverable letter would have ended up in Salzburg, Austria according to the postmark and no one would know anything about it ever again.)

Should be an easy fix, right?

Roadblock #1: getting in contact with the tax office.

First stop was to phone up the tax office, which was also the first mistake. The assessment only listed a phone number that led to an answering machine with only two messages, neither of which were particularly helpful or accurate: 1) all the lines are busy and 2) you’re calling outside of normal working hours. My mistake was to call on a Friday, a day that is holier to admin than Good Friday is to Christians. Forget about the Germany-wide ban on dancing on Good Friday, we’re talking about an admin-wide ban on working on Any Friday. So there’s a good chance that the lines were not so much busy as the office was just empty. All morning long. And contrary to the second recorded message, my last try on that Friday was indeed well within the times printed on the assessment. But, I guess that office hours can unexpectedly change a lot in the entire week since the assessment was printed and mailed.

Roadblock #2: the tax office.

Thankfully, calling again after what for us mortals counts a normal weekend resulted in reaching an actual admin type, but, unfortunately, with an unthankful answer: no, they couldn’t change anything. Instead I’d have to formally object to the assessment, either by mail or through the website. That’s right. Object to the assessment essentially because of a change of address. Even though the change was my fault, it’s really no different than moving or selling the property (either of which would also be my fault) and hopefully don’t merit a formal objection as well. Or updating the database, which is what this whole exercise was about in the first place.

Roadblock #3: the website of the tax office.

Not having learned my lesson the first time around, I decided to use the website to register my objection. After all, if I could achieve the same thing with a simple letter, I could probably send that letter directly via the website, right?

Hahahahaha …

Turns out there exists a specific, dedicated four-part form for objections that is as obscure and finicky as any other on the website. Got my name and address in ok (this time, sigh …), but then it was off to the meat of the form, the objection itself. I had to choose which assessment I was objecting to (Bescheid über die Grundsteueräquivalenzbeträge; mercifully available from a dropdown list), the relevant year (another dropdown list), whether I was objecting to the entire assessment or only part of it (button), and then why I was objecting to it (free text). After the form resolutely objected to my input for 20 minutes, I discovered that the year was optional in this case and could be left blank, but whether I was objecting in whole or in part was not and had to be filled out. Just changing the address sounded like “in part” to me and so I went with that. The form was happy and submittable and so I too was weirdly happy if slightly vegetable.

In the end, it all wasn’t so much a case of a lot of time wasted, but a lot of time unnecessarily wasted because it was all so unnecessary and unnecessarily complicated. The closed-ranks nature of the entire process makes it seem like it was specifically designed to keep outsiders who don’t speak the lingo out so as to make money for the insiders who did. Even the non-eagle-eyed among us can easily see that precisely none of the updated data are going to be any different than the outdated data already on the books that they are replacing. The only exception to that might be the ground value of the property—probably the only relevant piece of data in the entire process—and that value came directly from the government anyway and so should have already been on the books.

So why on earth did so many people have to fry their sanity trying to navigate that awful website or surrender 200 EUR to have someone else do it for them?