Tax Compliance for Private Equity Funds

Everything flows! In the introduction to last year's article, we noted that the taxation of private equity funds and the shareholders of private equity funds subject to taxation in Germany has increasingly become the focus of the tax authorities in recent years. However, these issues have long since reached Germany's highest tax court, the BFH, as evidenced in particular by some very noteworthy BFH rulings in recent months.

To anticipate at this point: We see a lot of light on the side of the BFH and (even more?) shadow on the level of the tax authorities and the legislator. Even clear and unambiguous as well as dogmatically impeccable judgments are either simply ignored by the tax authorities or result in a draft bill of the Federal Ministry of Finance, in which an unwelcome case law, which corrects a senseless application or interpretation of the law by the tax authorities, is then reversed by way of a legislative amendment and the original opinion of the tax authorities is simply codified in law.

On May 08, 2019, the BMF published as a draft bill the "Draft Act on the Further Tax Promotion of Electromobility and on the Amendment of Other Tax Regulations" ("Electromobility Act" or better "JStG 2019"), which the Federal Cabinet launched as a draft bill almost unchanged on July 31, 2019. The name of the bill is misleading. Certainly, the majority of taxpayers have much to gain from a law promoting electromobility through taxation. However, this is again a so-called omnibus law in which numerous tax regulations are to be changed or introduced for the first time, in some cases massively, but this is clearly lost in the name of the law.