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Hamburg's finance senator angry at Bavarian colleagues

When Hamburg's Finance Senator Andreas Dressel (SPD) gets angry, you almost always read it immediately on the short message service Twitter.

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Hamburg's finance senator angry at Bavarian colleagues

When Hamburg's Finance Senator Andreas Dressel (SPD) gets angry, you almost always read it immediately on the short message service Twitter. And so it only took a few minutes on Tuesday for Dressel to tweet after the news from Bavaria circulated that the deadline for submitting the new property tax there would be extended.

The deadline for submissions is actually Tuesday. In Bavaria, however, taxpayers now have until the end of April to submit their declaration of property ownership.

This enraged Dressel. Only last week he sharply criticized Federal Finance Minister Christian Lindner in front of journalists. The FDP politician announced in October, without consulting the state ministers, that he would extend the deadline, which was actually supposed to end in October.

In Hamburg, according to Dressel, the announcement led to a dent in the completed property tax returns. Only since mid-January has the number of declarations increased again.

And now Bavaria's going it alone. "Last week at the finance ministers' conference, we all agreed not to extend the deadline," Dressel wrote on Twitter, using capital letters that could be understood as shouting alongside several exclamation marks. "Bayern is going it alone again," Dressel continued.

Solidarity and reliability between the federal states would look different. Dressel also told the dpa news agency that an extension of the deadline at this point would not solve any problems, "on the contrary: it creates new ones."

At the same time, Dressel announced that, unlike in Bavaria, there would be no general extension of the deadline for submitting property tax returns in Hamburg. "As of today, January 31, 2023, we have a submission rate of over 80 percent and are confident that there will be a few more declarations by the end of the period." In Bavaria, only 68 percent of the declarations had been received up to and including Monday.

The Bavarian Finance Minister Albert Füracker (CSU), on the other hand, received praise from the director of the Association of North German Housing Companies, Andreas Breitner. "Felix Bavaria!" - Happy Bavaria, said Breitner, whose association is active in Hamburg, Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg.

He described Bavaria's tactics as "populist-pragmatic politics before elections". But here they help the people and the state governments of the three northern German states should follow the example of Bavaria. "Especially in Schleswig-Holstein and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania - both states rely on the federal model - it is necessary to extend the deadline."

According to Breitner, this time could also help the authorities to process the application backlog. Ultimately, the authorities already have hundreds of thousands of declarations, so the employees are already busy. "If those citizens who have not yet submitted their declarations are given a little more time, it would not harm the entire property tax reform process."

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