German tax platform ELSTER collapses as people rush to file property forms

Since July 1, property owners in Germany have been being asked to submit details about their houses, apartments and land for the purpose of recalculating property taxes. But the rush proved to be all too much for the country’s online tax office, ELSTER, which promptly crashed over the weekend. 

Rush of property tax forms causes ELSTER to crash

“Due to enormous interest in the forms for the property tax reform, there are currently restrictions on availability,” the tax service’s website explained on Sunday evening. “We are already working intensively on being able to provide you with the usual quality as quickly as possible.”

The apology came after multiple people complained about being unable to access the website via the internet to submit their tax forms. Issues were also being reported with the Mein ELSTER and ElsterSmart app services.

The operator ruled out a potential hacker attack and said that the issues were simply technical problems caused by high demand. “At the weekend, due to very high user requests of well over 100.000 simultaneous accesses, there were unfortunately temporary restrictions and disruptions for some users,” a spokesperson said. The ELSTER service was first developed back in 1996 as a way to make interactions with the tax office easier and quicker. 

Germany reforming property tax rates

Following a ruling by the Federal Constitutional Court, Germany is currently in the process of majorly overhauling its property tax rates to make the system fairer, as it currently works off of property values calculated more than 60 years ago.

Millions of house, apartment and land owners are therefore being asked to submit a kind of tax return before the end of October, giving details about the size of their property, the year of construction, and its value.

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