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Some notes about the official system in Germany called "Elster"

1. Sign in via chip card or certificate based authentication for which the activation codes come in the post.

2. All forms are neatly laid out and guide you through the process of filing them, the quality of the frontend is really top notch, they even have a dark mode.

3. All insurances (health, life etc.) and wage statements have already been submitted and you just import them to your filing for that year, there's no guessing on what the correct deduction should be etc.

4. You add in your extra deductibles and submit, you'll have a response in the post within 2-4 weeks.

5. If anything is wrong I can call my dedicated guy at the local Finanzamt, I've had the same tax official for the last 10 years.

6. I still use tax advisors for some years because they just know more tricks then I do, and the legalese German is a bit of a pain to grok.

7. Best of all there's no requirement to do a yearly tax statement if you work a normal job.

discuss

jjcm|2 years ago

Australia is very similar to this, with the exception of activation codes in the post. Australia is pretty digital-first for their services, so you just sign in with your government ID and navigate to your taxes.

Everything is pre-filled. If you have no additional deductions to add in, taxes take around 5 minutes total to file. They have a fairly robust banking system as well so any additional tax you have to pay takes around 60s to send through any bank's mobile app.

whimsicalism|2 years ago

The US basically has a privatized version of this.

Pretty much all I need to do is upload a 1099 for my bank account interest & cap gains, everything else is autouploaded.

The main difference you have to realize is not that our system is actually super shitty, we just have 4x the number of people to complain about things.

bestcoder69|2 years ago

In the US, if you fail to file then you won’t receive your EITC. In practice, in the US poor neighborhoods are littered with scammy tax preparers for this reason. I’d call our systems substantially different.