After submitting your income tax return, you will receive a tax assessment that details which allowances and tax deductions were taken into account and how much tax you have to pay or will be refunded. However, it is not uncommon for errors to be found in tax assessments, meaning that the tax demand is either too high or too low. An examination of your tax assessment can get you back some of the taxes you have paid, but you only have one month to file an appeal.
Why should you check your tax assessment?
Every year you have to submit your tax return in the spring or have your tax advisor prepare it for you by the end of the year. A few months later you will receive your tax assessment, in which the tax office lists how much tax has already been withheld, how high your personal tax rate is, and how much money you have to pay or will be refunded. However, not all tax assessments are correct: Stiftung Warentest states that around a fifth of all tax assessments are incorrect, and the Association of German Taxpayers even assumes an error rate of up to 30%. Fortunately, around two thirds of all appeals against tax assessments are successful and result in tax refunds.
An error in the tax assessment can occur if there are fundamental changes to your income situation or tax treatment that have not been taken into account everywhere, for example in the case of divorce, marriage or retirement. There can also be discrepancies if you have entered into several employment relationships with different employers. If you have not submitted receipts for major tax-deductible expenses or if these have not been reviewed by the responsible clerk, these benefits will also be missing from the tax assessment.
Until when do you have time to check your tax assessment?
The deadline for appealing against a tax assessment is one month. However, it only begins on the third day after the date of issue of your tax assessment, as this is the day of notification, taking into account the postal service. If only a single point of your tax assessment needs to be changed, for example because a receipt was forgotten, you can submit an application to amend the tax assessment instead of an appeal. You can usually even do this by phone or email.
Please note that the contested tax assessment is valid until the appeal is upheld. This means that you must pay any additional taxes immediately. If your appeal is successful, any overpaid taxes will be refunded to you.
In order to postpone the payment deadline, you can file an appeal against the tax assessment or apply for a suspension of enforcement. If the tax office agrees to this request, you will not have to pay any additional tax until later. At a later date, however, you will not only have to pay the additional tax, but also interest for the delay: 0.5% per month.
How can you check your tax assessment yourself?
With a little time, you can check your income tax assessment yourself. Simply read the assessment line by line and compare the figures given with your expectations. It is particularly helpful if you have a copy of your tax return and can check that all entries in your tax return have also been taken into account in the tax assessment.
Modern tax programs and electronic tax returns already provide a preliminary estimate of the final tax burden you can expect and how high any additional payment or refund would be. If the figures in your tax assessment differ significantly from the estimates in your tax software, you should examine particularly critically where the differences lie and whether they are justified.
Your tax assessment should contain a text explaining whether and why information from your tax return could not be taken into account. If these comments do not help you, you can also call the tax office and ask them to explain the situation to you before you file an objection to your tax assessment.
Who can help you check your tax assessment?
If you have not been able to resolve the discrepancies in your tax assessment in a direct conversation with your tax office clerk, we recommend that you consult a specialist and contact a tax advisor. A tax advisor charges a time fee of between 30 and 70 euros for every half hour or part thereof for checking a tax assessment. If you only have income from employment, you can also contact a tax assistance association.
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