Talk:Taxation in Germany

Sixty-five percent of world tax literature?!
Please have the information thoroughly checked that sixty-five percent of world tax literature was in German, since this appears to be a mere urban legend. I have seen almost every figure between 50 and 90 for that percentage, I also heard that this percentage referred to literature in German language (thus including Austria and Switzerland) etc. Therefore, please have this statement at least leveled off. 84.176.172.200 18:07, 10 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Actually it is a urban legend. According to tax expert and former Professor Albert Rädler, there is only ten percent - quite a lot and also most of the worlds tax literature, but far away from extreme 60 percent. Besides: The United States, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands follow with scarce distance. --Fürst Gorg 13:00, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

Wrong statement about private health insurance
"while private health insurance policies cover individual risks only" Not true! Private insurance covers children, until they work themselves (and therefore fall into the mandatory public insurance) FreddyE 21:39, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

POV
"The complexity of the German tax system is a result of constant modifications prompted by political and corporate pressure groups, as well as a very German tendency that wishes to regulate everything en detail instead of via broad general rules."

What the heck? From the intro paragraph no less. I am going to remove the last half of that sentence for obvious reasons. - Lucky13pjn 00:24, 5 August 2006 (UTC)

Indvidual Taxation Example
The worked example doesn't seem to add up. My calculations are as follows:

€32000, being in the second part of the linear progressive zone, from the description ealier should have tax as follows: €0 - €7664:                =    €0  €7665 - €12739:  €5076 @ 24%   = €1218 €12740 - €32000: €19260 @ 32.8% = €6317                       total tax = €7535 - where the 32.8% is calculated as follows: €32000 - €12740 = €19260 €52152 - €12740 = €39412 €19260/€39412 = 0.4887 ie: €32000 is 48.87% of the way through the (42%-24%=)18% spread of the second linear progressive zone, and so the rate is: 18% * .4887 = 8.7963%       + 24% = 32.7963% (rounded to 32.8%)

This is about €900 more than the worked example - where am I going wrong?

Lwowska 14:46, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

Sorry Lwowska.. I wrote the example, but it's been a long time since I've tried to understand it.. I'm going to add a tag saying it needs checking by an expert (as soon as I find out how)..

Parabolon (talk) 03:02, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

It is much more simple. http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/estg/__32a.html

For €32000 you will need § 32a (1) No. 3 EStG, because the income is between €13140 and €52551:

z=(€32000 - €13139)/10000 = 1.8861

(228,74 * 1.8861 + 2397) * 1.8861 + 1007 = €6341,69

€6341,69 / €32000 = 19.81%

Federal vs. State Taxation:
As a foreigner, I wonder how the taxation issues (and income) are divided between the Federal Republic and the states. Does the collected income tax contain a specific percentage of state tax, which is separated before the rest of the money goes for federal budget, or does the federal budget contain also the money that is allocated for the states for their expenses?
 * Information has been added.Karsten11 (talk) 14:34, 25 May 2008 (UTC)

German taxes
According to a chart from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) of “Comparison of Taxes paid by a household earning the country's average wage” in the tax article, in the United States, a single person with no kids pays 29.1% of his/her income in taxes and a married couple with two kids pays 11.9%; compare to Germans in the same conditions paying 51.8% and 35.7% respectively. 1.78 times and 3 times as much, IOW. This seems incredibly high, even granting that taxes in the US are lower than most places. No mention of this in this article? I can't imagine there's another article more appropriate for discussing it... RobertM525 10:15, 8 March 2007 (UTC)

The OECD taxing study considers income taxes AND social security burden on labour income as one figure (see here). More detailed: income taxes are progressive (the more you earn, the higher the percentage of income tax) and are 100% burden to employee, social securitys with fixed percentages (with upper and lower exemption limits) and burden is splitted 50/50 (some exceptions) between employee and employer. Compulsory social security burden in Germany consist of Workless Insurance, Pension fund, Health Insurance, Accident Insurance and Long term care Insurance.

Lets take an example: year 2011, single person, no kids, annual average income 41.000 EUR (found somewhere as average, but seems too high as average to me)
 * Income tax: 17,3% ~ 7092 EUR
 * Solidarity surcharge: 0,95% ~390 EUR
 * Pension Fund (employee part): 9,95% ~4080 EUR
 * Workless Insurance (employee part): 1,5% ~615 EUR
 * Long term care Insurance (employee part): 0,975% +0,25% for childless ~500 EUR
 * Health Insurance (employee part): 7,3% ~ 3360 EUR
 * Accident Insurance (100% employer financed)

That would leave a net income of 24.960 EUR on an annual pay slip and a complete burden of 39.12% on income - how they calculated a burden of more than 50% I cannot explain… — Preceding unsigned comment added by JA ALT (talk • contribs) 13:07, 19 September 2011 (UTC)

Some more information on social taxes are in this article. --Martinvoll (talk) 21:10, 13 March 2012 (UTC)

fiscal year
Is the fiscal year in Germany congruent with the calender year? T om ea s y talk 18:54, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
 * In general: Yes.Karsten11 (talk) 07:33, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

Use of german terms in article
The use of terms is inconsistent & confusing to non-native (German) speakers. The 1st paragraph declares all terms with their English equivalents. Subsequently though, both the German words are used ("Bund and Länder" instead of "federation and states") and the English ones (e.g. "Districts/Municipalities" instead of "Gemeinden"). The definition of "districts" is missing completely btw, another source of confusion. "Districts/Municipalities" sounds like an unnecessary pleonasm.

I suggest that one or the other should be used throughout the article. Aka: all English or all German terms, not a mix, as currently.

In light of readability (recall the goals of Wikipedia), I would suggest to use the English terms everywhere. If concerns of ambiguity arise from this, I suggest capitalizing these (e.g. "the States" instead of "the states"). I'm happy to make these changes myself, if people concurred.

MoritzMoeller (talk) 12:28, 22 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I agree. There are a small number of terms used only in Germany like "Gewerbesteuer". These terms without an edequate english term may be in German but we should use english terms as much as possible.Karsten11 (talk) 07:37, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

User: Platane, 2009 October 20

I agree to your ideas and made a revision. In some case we should use the German term, if someone gets in contact with German tax matters or is tax specialist —Preceding unsigned comment added by Platane (talk • contribs) 14:21, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

Period for "Income tax for residents"
Are the values considered on a yearly or monthly basis? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 201.77.240.12 (talk) 16:59, 11 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Annually. T om ea s y T C 21:22, 6 February 2011 (UTC)

Car taxation
Hi. There is an orphan page Taxation of private car usage - which explains the perks tax on company cars in Germany. I feel that that page should be incorporated into Taxation in germany - would anyone like to do this? Gbawden (talk) 13:27, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Social Security
The current article does not cover this subject... may I add it?ParanoidLemmings (talk) 08:35, 15 October 2014 (UTC)

General structure and duplicate content
I think we should improve the structure of the article in the part "Income tax for residents". Why did you move the tax groups (Steuerklassen) to an extra paragraph? I don't see a reason for "Alexander Berfeld's" new paragraph "Withholding taxes". Also there are duplicate paragraphs for both real property transfer tax (Grunderwerbssteuer) and capital gains tax (Abgeltungssteuer). I suggest to remove them from the income tax paragraph, as they are not discussed in the German income tax law (EStG), but to keep the separate paragraphs at the bottom of the article and merge the information there. I agree that we should merge the orphan about the taxation of the private use of commercial cars. Seabas57 (talk) 09:02, 15 April 2015 (UTC)sebas57

Assessment comment
Substituted at 07:41, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

Some article-paragraph refs are incorrect
It was great to see all the citations to Article and paragraph in the "Taxation principles" section, here; however, it appears some of them are wrong. (I didn't check every single one.) For example: Some are right: I'll probably remove all of them until they can be verified, or maybe I'll just leave the one that is verified correct, and the others can be re-added and linked to Wikisource. Btw, because of some bone-headed decisions about the section headers for Articles in the Wikisource page, linking to specific articles of the Basic Law source is tricky, and using HTML entities to escape the square brackets is required or your link will not work. See the wikicode in this section to see how to do it, but in brief, instead of  code   instead. Mathglot (talk) 08:14, 30 April 2019 (UTC)
 * The ability-to-pay principle (Art. 3 para. 1) but 3-1 deals with equality before the law.
 * The lawfulness of taxation (Art. 2 para. 1 and Art. 20 para. 3) but 2-1 is about personal freedom, and 20-3 about the limitations on the three branches of government.
 * The federation has the right on customs. (Art. 105 para. 1) is correct.

Lead needs expansion
The lead is currently inadequate, and doesn't come close to summarizing the article, which is one of the main purposes of a lead. I've started to expand it, adding a paragraph about the legal basis of taxation in the Constitution. Much more work needs to be done. Mathglot (talk) 09:23, 30 April 2019 (UTC)

Unreferenced sections
Numerous sections of the article have no references at all. Wikipedia's policy on verifiability requires that all content be verifiable. Major sections that remain entirely unreferenced include Taxation principles and Structural organisation of fiscal administration; others include Jurisdiction, Fiscal Code. Section Value added tax has four subsections and two references. The long, detailed section Income tax for residents which has eleven subsections, has one reference. Section Corporation tax with three subsections has none. Section Trade tax has three subsections and no references. According to verifiability policy, unsourced content may be removed if citations from reliable sources are not forthcoming. Mathglot (talk) 07:32, 1 May 2019 (UTC)
 * Quick (and rather late) question: From what I can see, the German article uses legal texts as references. Is this permittable? I would have thought this would constitute original research? EdgarAllanFrost (talk) 13:50, 1 January 2021 (UTC)