A disabled man regularly takes a taxi to work. That gets pretty expensive over the year. The question now: Are the costs tax deductible?
Employees cannot fully deduct taxi rides to work from their taxes. Instead, they are only allowed to deduct the usual commuter flat rate of 30 cents per kilometer for a taxi, as the Federal Fiscal Court (BFH) in Munich decided in a judgment published on Thursday. This means that a taxi does not count as public transport, because employees can deduct the actual ticket costs for buses or trains.
The question of whether a taxi counts as a means of public transport in tax law or not was an explicit topic of the proceedings. The sixth Senate of the BFH came to the conclusion that the exemption for public transport in the Income Tax Act is actually only intended for buses and trains, not for taxis.
This is bitter for the plaintiff, who lives in Thuringia: The man has not been able to drive a car safely himself since 2007 due to a disability, as the decision shows. The process was about the years 2016 and 2017. In the two years, the man had spent over 9,000 euros on taxi rides to work, which he wanted to deduct from the tax. In the first instance before the Thuringian finance court, he had still won.
Verdict
Source: Stern
Jane Stock is a technology author, who has written for 24 Hours World. She writes about the latest in technology news and trends, and is always on the lookout for new and innovative ways to improve his audience’s experience.
