Tax return: the fastest tax offices
As the anonymized evaluation of more than 300,000 tax returns and 502 tax offices shows, the three fastest tax offices of the past year are all in North Rhine-Westphalia. The tax office “delivered” the fastest Warburg with a processing time of 32.2 days, just ahead of the previous year’s winner Herne, where taxpayers waited an average of 32.9 days for their notifications. The tax office landed in third place Arnsberg with an average processing time of 33.1 days. For comparison: taxpayers waited the longest in Mannheim-Neckarstadt (Baden-Württemberg) on your decision: There the average processing time was 83.2 days, i.e. around three months.
Processing time of the countries
This time it is in the ranking of the federal states Berlin Front: The average processing there took only 42.7 days. Follow in the other places Hamburg (44.6 days) and that Saarland (45.2 days). This time it took the clerks the longest in Bremen, where taxpayers waited an average of 56.3 days for the decision, it was a little faster in Thuringia (55.6 days) and Brandenburg (55.5 days).
Compared to previous years, however, all federal states increased: the previous year’s winners Rhineland-Palatinate (2020) and North Rhine-Westphalia (2019) were around four days slower than Berlin with 46.2 and 47 days respectively. The difference is even clearer at the end of the ranking, where the bottom-up Thuringia still needed an average of 71.4 days for processing last year – around 15 days more.
Processing time: Faster despite Corona
While the processing time of the individual tax offices was mostly shortened, the bottom line was that the smaller countries in particular improved. “It is noticeable that two city-states occupy the first two places,” says Felix Bodeewes, managing director of Lohnsteuer-kompakt.de. “And Saarland, which is also small, follows in third place. It looks as if the financial administrations of small federal states were able to react better to the organizational challenges of the Corona crisis.”
In the first Corona year 2020, the tax offices were around one day faster than in 2019 (54.7 days) with an average of 53.1 processing days. This time, the positive trend has even increased by 4.1 days: on a national average, taxpayers now only wait 49 days for the decision. Since 2017, the processing time has been reduced by more than ten days.