It’s about time: our local “Finanzamt” which is the town’s legal entity to collect your income taxes in Germany, in my case Hamburg-Hansa (which will hopefully not change due to the move), has again reminded me that my income taxes were due in May and that I should consider handing them in till September, 14th, or else…. (I love those “or else” letters).

So, I’m at the moment preparing my income taxes which is a bit difficult due to “Christian Louis Veranstaltungstechnik und Medienproduktion”, my own company that I founded 11 years ago. I don’t do anything anymore that is considered to be even partly self-employed, but since the legal entity still exists, it is part of my income taxes.

The problem is however that – also due to historic reasons – this company’s legal address is still in Leverkusen, my birth town. I never bothered to change this, since – as already mentioned – I don’t actively do anything with it anyways.

So, instead of handing in all my paperwork at ONE tax office, I have to first of all file my company’s taxes in Leverkusen (which is normally done quite quickly, just write a bunch of zeroes in some forms) and after that I have to take the outcome (0 EUR income out of my company) and file my personal income taxes in Hamburg.

Quick HowTo, so that I remember how to do this next year:

0. Hand in “Umsatzsteuererklärung”

1. Grab an “Anlage G” to claim your company’s profit and hand it in together with the so-called “Mantelbogen”: Erklärung zur gesonderten Feststellung von Grundlagen für die Einkommensbesteuerung, Vordruck ESt 1 B

2. Send to Leverkusen tax office, wait for results

3. File Einkommensteuererklärung Vordruck Est 1 A + additional sheets like KAP with the Hamburg tax office

Especially writing down the names hopefully helps me remembering all of this in 2011. If you are curious how such a German tax form looks like, you’ll find plenty of them here: https://www.formulare-bfinv.de/ffw/content.do

For my other “normal” income taxes, I use t@x 2010 by the way; unfortunately this crazy “you own a company in a different town” stuff can’t be managed with this properly.