Can some one explain how your tax system works in Germany vs the USA?

Question

I am curious to know for this is known as the USA tax season right now. Thanks. Danke.

Answer 1

When filling out your tax form, you can always call a toll-free telephone number and friendly people will help you or send you easy-to-understand instructions. The tax forms are very easy to fill out, and at the end you know exactly how much taxes you owe. You can even file your whole taxes over the phone. Compare that to complicated Byzantine tax forms in Germany which are much longer than those in the US. The instructions for the German forms are nearly incomprehensible since they use their own lawyer speak. Once you have filled out everything, you send it in, someone checks it all and computes your actual tax load which you only learn much later. (On the side: by German standards, taxes in the US are laughably low, which makes the constant American complaining about high taxes seem rather funny to me.)

        Other bureaucracies are also generally friendlier in the US than in Germany. German bureaucrats tend to see their customers as a nuisance and treat them accordingly, while US bureaucracies work more like customer serving businesses. This could however also simply be a consequence of the generally higher level of friendliness in the US which I'll talk more about in the Violence and Aggression section. [there is no customer service whatsoever in germany, so it's no surprise that the bureaucratic offices treat you like c**p.]

        Given my good old German bureaucratic mind-set, the boundless ineffectiveness of US bureaucracies bothers me a lot. For example, the US is not able to enforce child payments of divorced fathers. As a father, you just move away and there's a very good chance that you'll never have to pay. The mother would have to hire private investigators and lawyers in order to track you down and make you pay, but of course she doesn't have the money for that. Since the bureaucracy is of no help, there actually exist private companies who promise to make the deadbeat father pay, for a heavy percentage. In Germany, child payments are simply taken out of the father's paycheck, end of story. If there are problems collecting, then the collecting bureaucracy loses money, not the mother, because she receives the money from that agency in either case.

        Another example is the fact that the US has no effective way of forcing someone to pay an outstanding bill or to make a credit payment. In fact, I remember seeing a sign at the student loan office at my university which said "No defaulting allowed". This strikes Germans as very funny: the word `defaulting' does not even have a translation, [*ahem* "vers�umen (transitive verb): to miss [unterlassen]: to neglect, to fail"] because the concept is virtually non-existent in Germany; it is simply impossible to default - if you don't pay, you will be reminded a couple of times and then someone from the court will come and take away your belongings. If you don't own enough, they'll put a hold on part of your future earnings. By contrast, in the US there's a whole industry of private "collection agencies" who don't have any executive power and can't do much more than harass debtors without end. Even the payment of traffic tickets or other legal penalties is not enforced: In Santa Barbara, the city government takes out a page in the local newspaper every couple of months and lists everyone by name who failed to pay their ticket. Nothing else happens to them, unless they happen to be stopped for another traffic violation. Amazing. [of course, the penalty for for not making a payment of some kind is a bad credit rating and since americans rely far more on credit than germans do, this can be a reasonable punishment.]

        A more bothering instance of US inefficiency is the apparent inability to ensure full immunization of children. The immunization level in the US is now lower than that in some developing countries. [uh, that's news to me. so far as I know, almost all children in america are immunized.]

        And one last example: in Germany, it is impossible to have a car with a valid license plate and not carry car insurance. If you apply for a license, you have to present proof of insurance; if you drop your insurance, your name is forwarded from the insurance company to the appropriate agency, which will invalidate your license plate. Non-valid license plates are easy to spot from far away. [not true. germany has exactly the same system of a small sticker on the license plate to indicate that it's valid.] This simple system makes sure that everyone who drives carries car insurance. The US bureaucracies are apparently not able to create a similar system. Accidents with uninsured drivers are a major problem here. [that's a good point. the car registration and insurance system in america could use a german-style overhaul.]

        [overall, the german bureaucracy does a better job of ensuring that everyone keeps all their ducks in a row. it's worth noting that this requires a higher degree of control over its citizens, thus limiting freedom. from the average joe's perspective, however, "The System" here in germany is nothing more than a pain in the ***. as I mentioned in a chapter of Life After College, "here you fill out 3 extra forms and go to 2 offices to get them stamped...", and I used to think that everything went smoothly once you did all the paperwork, but that's not true either. it's simply more paperwork hassle and the aforementioned extreme unfriendliness.]

Answer 2

It is impossible Wulff, in Germany it is not complicated to pay tax, it is complicated to avoid taxification. If you want to invest in Germany there you need a specialist. Germany is the country with nominal extreme high taxification, the truth is, if you take all chances of tax redumption we pay less than all the others.

Greetings from Hamburg, Germany

Heinz

ps: there was a guy (don't know his name) saying, without german taxification system Hollywood will be bancrupt. But it is complicated to teach you in one sentence how to build a ship in Korea or producing pic in Hollywood to reduce your tax in Nordharlinger Siel, Lower Saxony.