A culture of mistrust, denunciation, tax pillory: with his idea of setting up an online reporting platform for evidence of tax fraud, the green finance minister in Baden-Württemberg triggered a wave of indignation. Especially since Chancellor candidate Annalena Baerbock showed sympathy for the proposal.
After the criticism of the new anonymous reporting platform for the determination of tax fraudsters in Baden-Württemberg, there is also a dispute over a possible similar model at the federal level. Green Chancellor candidate Annalena Baerbock praises the offer and can also imagine it nationwide. Politicians from the SPD and FDP are against it.
“We have to create places where you can also report when you know that there is violent tax fraud,” said the Green Chancellor candidate on Wednesday evening at the “Bundestag election show” on the ProSieben TV station. That is now being done in Baden-Württemberg and would actually have “also been the job of a federal finance minister,” said Baerbock. “The next federal government should introduce that too.”
Union and AfD accuse the Baden-Württemberg state finance minister Danyal Bayaz (Greens) against using the “tax pillory” to promote denunciation on the Internet. The financial policy spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group, Lothar Binding, was now in the same line: “This promotes a culture of mistrust, resentment, insinuation and denunciation” and should not “sneak into our society,” he told the television broadcaster Bild.
Federal Finance Minister Olaf Scholz expressed himself more cautiously: It is “important that we all pay our taxes fairly, and I assume that most citizens do the same,” said the SPD candidate for chancellor. Otherwise there have been “very proper practices” for a long time, then it is “the tax officials who have to do their job”.
Around three weeks before the general election, FDP party leader Christian Lindner also rejected Baerbock’s demand. It is true that the digitization of financial administrations is overdue. But: “What we don’t need is a state call to denounce our neighbors,” Lindner told the newspapers of the Funke media group. “The demand that the Greens are now making reveals distrust in the citizens, not trust.”
Incitement against finance ministers on the Internet
Bayaz had already been heavily criticized on Wednesday for the introduction of the so far unique information portal. He was violently attacked not only on the political stage, but also in the social media by racists and agitators. The minister would report the worst insults, said the Ministry of Finance in Stuttgart at the request of the German Press Agency.
There were numerous inhuman, racist and sexist comments on his Twitter and Instagram accounts. The new portal of the Ministry of Finance for evidence of tax evasion also received emails with violent insults. “Newly learned today: Law & Order, but please not with taxes,” Bayaz tweeted late in the evening.
The state finance minister has rejected the criticism and pointed out the practice of all German tax offices, which has been common for many years. The new anonymous information portal is a “complementary instrument in the fight for more tax justice”. Anonymous reports have already been possible so far, by letter or telephone, and that is no different in other federal states. “But it should also go online in 2021, hence the online system,” Bayaz said on Wednesday.
By the end of the year, Germany must also implement an EU directive to protect so-called whistleblowers, the Ministry of Finance announced on Thursday about the legal background. According to this, federal and state authorities must offer a safe reporting point for insiders who uncover or pass on grievances or criminal machinations.
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