(2022) What is the non-assessment limit?

Many tax officials may deny their existence. And taxpayers cannot rely on benefiting from them, as there is no legal entitlement to the non-invocation limit.

Non-invocation limits are amounts – usually small sums – in the tax return that tax officials generally do not scrutinise closely and accept without evidence.

Here are some examples:

• Working days for travel allowance: For a 5-day week, you can state 230 working days per year and for a 6-day week, 280 days.
• Work-related items: You can usually claim costs up to 110 Euro for the purchase and maintenance of work-related items (purchase and cleaning of work clothing) in your tax return without receipts.

 

Journeys to work, specifically to the primary workplace, are deductible with the commuter allowance. In principle, every employee is required to state the exact number of days they actually travelled to work in their tax return (Form N), as the allowance is only granted for these days. To check whether the number of working days declared is plausible, holiday and sick days must also be declared. Since 2020, business travel days and home working days have also been queried in Form N.

However, it can be very tedious to determine the exact number of working days. Who keeps a daily tally? And then there are employees who also visit the workplace at weekends, sometimes unexpectedly. Therefore, the tax offices established so-called non-invocation limits decades ago. They generally accepted 220 to 230 journeys for a five-day week and 260 to 280 journeys for a six-day week between home and workplace. It should be noted that these are internal limits of the tax offices, and there is no legal entitlement to their application, even though the Munich Tax Court ruled a few years ago that the tax offices should accept 230 days (FG Munich of 12.12.2008, 13 K 4371/07).

So far, so good. But Covid has changed everything. Countless employees were and still are working from home and do not travel to the office or workplace daily. They can claim a flat rate of 5 Euro per day as business expenses for these days or even the costs for a home office. However, due to the lack of journeys, they may not claim travel expenses.

And this is precisely where the tax offices are increasingly intervening, demanding a certificate from the employer stating the actual working days and, above all, the days on which the primary workplace was visited. The rule that 220 or 230 journeys per year are accepted no longer applies automatically!