Berlin FAQ Blog

When I am old and my remaining plumage is greying, no doubt there will come a time when the grandchicks will run up to me and ask excitedly "Grandpenguin! What did you do during the war?" And I will have to answer that that is a hopelessly outdated question, and I belonged the last generation who could legitimately ask it. Not that I ever did, but the subject came up in educated German company the other night, and without thinking I casually mentioned one grandfather was a "Flakhelfer in Coventry". Really, after 16 years in Germany I should have known better, and I had the ensuing slightly shamed-cum-sympathetic silence coming to me.

Anyway, instead of spending my youth lobbing munitions at the Hun and his erstwhile Far Eastern ally, I instead went to live in both their capitals and learnt their languages, so I will have to say something like "I engaged in a passive war of nerves with the German tax authorities" and did wild and crazy things such as spending the evening at a sort of informal seminar on Mehrwertsteuer, aka Value Added Tax (but which is not quite the same as the US American sales tax, apparently).

It was, as these things go, interesting. Or to be more precise, comforting, because it seems that after several years filling out the forms by myself, I have got hold of largely the right end of the stick when it comes to the general principles (I won't bore you with the details, but they involve string theory and the occasional ritual sacrifice of small rodents). However, having recently carefully completed my return for 2006 and spending a day or so coming to the conclusion that I owed the state about €800, which I could claim back next year, I was somewhat consternated by their opinion that they owed me about €400 instead. Also, there are still vast swathes of material which are best read while sticking ones head into a bucket of sand, involving numbered paragraphs and three-way intra-European exchanges of goods and services, where I have until now just hoped they don't apply to me. Nevertheless, among others I learnt that there is a §13b, which could be useful if paying invoices to entities in non EU countries because you can count part of the sum as a sort of virtual Mehrwertsteuer. Or something. As is the way with Mehrwertsteuer, it exists in its own world, related to but separate from the more intuitive business of money coming in, money going out and the (ridiculously small) difference between the two.

So it was basically productive use of an evening, and if anyone out there has any questions about Mehrwertsteuer, I will happily forward you the name of someone who is more passionate about the subject than I am.

Added: I seem to have ranted about this last year too.