Ok, I am also reviving my own thread. I will bite the bullet this year and file a return even though I am much below 120k. I have been royally .... ....d this year because I lost all my allowances to tax, I mean that I received some money from the EU to cover my 15.000 km move and I paid about 90% tax on it.

There are another 14 scientists at my institute in exactly the same position and we are filing through one Treuhand, although no one knows if we actually end up paying more, so we are actually quite worried. We want to file because our kanton has been more than a pain to us.

The problem is for example, there is this supposedly Expatriate allowance with seems to be a fixed 1500 CHF deduction you can use, but only if you still own a house outside of Switzerland, and of course, young scientists usually do not!

It looks like we have no way of reducing our quellensteuer and claim back some of the (90%) on tax that we paid on EU allowances.

Does anyone have experience with this socalled Expatriate deduction, and what did you need to claim for this? Or any other major deductions that could actually make a difference, as we are all stumbling in the dark together.... Should we invest in Dr Tax and the like, does that come with an explanation of deductions in cases like this?