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Any Germans out there can help me understand this radio "tax"?
Australopitenico
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I have been living in Germany for a couple of years, and today I received a letter where it says that I need to pay a certain quantity to the German radio companies because...eh...no reason. They are just asking for money.
I had heard some things about it before, but I didn't really take it seriously. I don't own a TV, I don't own a radio. I have exactly 0 interest in German radio or TV and I am already paying for a perfectly legal music system (Spotify).
So any German here that knows more than me can explain me how this works? Is this an official tax? Do I need to pay for a service I have never used nor I plan to use? Do they have any legal backup for this or is it some sort of racket where they ask people for money in the hopes they decide to pay instead of getting into trouble?
Thank you guys.
I had heard some things about it before, but I didn't really take it seriously. I don't own a TV, I don't own a radio. I have exactly 0 interest in German radio or TV and I am already paying for a perfectly legal music system (Spotify).
So any German here that knows more than me can explain me how this works? Is this an official tax? Do I need to pay for a service I have never used nor I plan to use? Do they have any legal backup for this or is it some sort of racket where they ask people for money in the hopes they decide to pay instead of getting into trouble?
Thank you guys.
Australopitenico on
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This seems to suggest that if you own a TV, Radio, or PC you need to pay the fee. This is the equivalent of PBS funding I guess, public tv/radio funded via state tax.
EDIT: The information provided in the link by SanderJK is out of date, since this year every household has to pay a flat fee whether or not you own any reception device.
Again, it's technically not a tax. It's not based on a federal law but rather on agreements between all the German states ("Staatsverträge"). Funding needs aren't determined by the federal government or state governments but by the KEF, an independent commission. The main reason behind this is to maintain the independence of public broadcasters.
I'm not sure why the existence of the license fee is so surprising to you, something similar exists in most of Europe.
Well, I'm from Spain, public television is funded with public funds there, so there is no TV license.
Even if we did have TV license, I understood TV license as something you pay for a service you are using. You own a TV, you pay a license. you watch TV. That's logical. Every household having to pay a tax whether they own a TV or not is news to me, surprising and seems very, very fishy, so that's why I was asking.
The change was made this year to simplify things. Earlier, people had to register individual devices, then you had to pay the license fee if you owned internet-capable devices even if you didn't own a TV or radio (so you would have had to pay anyway)... it was turning into a huge, bureaucratic mess. Since the number of households which own neither a TV nor a radio nor any internet-capable device is probably negligible, the current approach was chosen.
The tax is there to finance the public broadcasting programmes. This is not covered by your normal tax, because when this tax was introduced it was designed to only burden those citizens that own a tv/radio.
I.e. you only pay for what you use.
Recently, however, they've changed the laws around this because, shocker, people own radios/tvs and do not pay the tax. (A point can be made that owning a tv doesnt mean you watch the shitty public channels but whatever).
The government then decided that if people can't stay honest they're simply going to tax everyone.
Next topic: GEMA! ;D