Читать книгу German Profit Taxes - Christoph Freichel - Страница 11

Taxes make up the largest portion of state earnings in all industrial countries, including Germany. According to the legal definition contained in Sec. 3 (1) AO (The Fiscal Code of Germany), taxes are “payments of money that do not represent counter-performance for a particular performance and that are imposed by a polity on all those who fulfill the statutory requirements for the tax liability, in order to generate income”. The term “tax” possesses the following characteristics:

•Compulsory levies: Taxes are levied by public corporations by virtue of their financial sovereignty. The taxpayer is to pay these levies if certain statutory requirements are fulfilled. It is not voluntary.

•Payments of money: According to their definition, taxes are payments of money, not performances in kind. They can be payment obligations that occur once (e.g. inheritance tax, and land transfer tax GrESt) or periodically recurring payment obligations (e.g. income tax, corporate income tax, and trade tax).

•No counter-performance: Taxes neither establish an entitlement to counter-performance by the state, nor is the level of taxes calculated directly according to the public services received by the taxpayer. Thus, taxes are not calculated in accordance with the equivalence principle.

•Public polity: Tax sovereignty is a prerequisite to levying taxes. In Germany, this is vested in the federal government (Bund), the federal states (Länder), the municipalities (Gemeinden) as well as those religious communities that possess the status of a corporation under public law.

•Statutory basis: Taxes must be levied from all who fulfill the statutory requirements for the tax liability. Taxes may not be levied in the absence of a statutory basis.

•Realization of earnings also as secondary objective: Taxes not only serve in the realization of earnings, but also economic- and socio-political (steering-) purposes. For this reason, the discipline of financial science also points out the possibility of using taxes to influence the behavior of the taxpayers (“ecology tax”).

The levy of taxes is accompanied by the so-called ancillary expenses related to taxes. According to Sec. 3 (4) AO, these are late fees, interest, surcharges on arrears, administrative fines and costs. In doing so, the legislature does not intend to realize earnings, but rather to cause a certain behavior on the part of the taxpayer. Ancillary expenses related to taxes are imposed if the tax-related obligations are not or are belatedly fulfilled by the taxpayer.