Tax cheats might have the last laugh in a major European tax spat after all – German investigators may not be able to tackle a flood of data on alleged tax dodgers before a key deadline.
The battle by European politicians and investigators to get at hidden Swiss accounts is in peril, according to German daily «Handelsblatt». The outlet reported that German tax officials literally can’t wrap up tax investigations into alleged tax dodgers and cheats among its citizens – because they have too many of them to get through.
Germany's tax inspectors are coping with a flood of data on Germans with accounts in more than 90 countries, all of which have shipped a total of 6.8 million sets of data to Berlin. There, officials are sifting through to root out suspected tax dodgers and cheats.
Slow Bureaucracy
The problem? Time is running out because the statute on early cases runs out at the end of this year, according to the outlet. The U.S. and European Union member states had already sent Germany confidential data before an automated data-swapping mechanism came into force. Specifically, the statute will run out on 1.2 million sets of data at year-end.
Effectively, this means that some German tax dodgers and cheats may escape punishment simply because of bureaucracy's slow pace. Germany's finance department had warned previously in an analysis that its state departments – who are responsible for taxes – wouldn't be able to cope with the data flood in time.
