Correction of tax assessment notices when electronic data is transferred – Tax consultants – Holzwickede – Dortmund – Hagen – Lünen – Kamen

Employers, banks, pension insurance carriers and other “paying agents” are obligated,

electronically transmit to the tax authorities information on payments made to their employees, investors, pension beneficiaries, etc. This also applies mutatis mutandis to social security institutions and certain insurance companies with regard to the contributions collected. The tax authorities use these electronic data in particular for the income tax assessment of the respective employees, savers, pensioners, etc.

The Federal Fiscal Court has ruled,

that in cases where the information on wages provided in an income tax return does not match the data provided by the employer to the tax office, the tax office clerks must determine what the correct wages are. In the underlying dispute, a married couple had correctly reported their wages in their tax return; however, the tax office had accepted the (too low) wages reported by the employers. The court rejected a subsequent amendment of the tax assessment (for the year 2011) based on corrected employer data because the tax authority had relied solely on the data provided by the employer and thus failed to fulfill its duty to investigate.

After a change in the law

However, tax assessments for years from 2017 onwards can be expressly amended insofar as the electronically transmitted data were not taken into account or were taken into account incorrectly. It does not matter whether duties to cooperate or to investigate were violated or whether processing errors etc. were made.

Since errors in the data provided by employers, etc. cannot be completely ruled out, particular care should be taken here to compare the data taken into account in the tax assessment with one’s own information provided in the tax return.

(Further comments & information on this can be found in our information letter 05/2018 under item 1.)