Hi all, I have spent some time looking through the various Quellensteuer threads but am not yet completely clear on what I need to do now in my situation - please excuse my dumbness on such things.

I am on a B-permit paying Quellensteuer. Previously I was living and working in Bern, but have recently moved to live in Luzern, commuting each day back to Bern.

I was always under the impression that the Quellensteuer tariff was based on where you live, so expected to see a a change in the amount deducted from my monthly pay. While my monthly salary statement now indicates that my Quellensteuerabzug is now 'Luzern', the deduction has stayed at the Bern rate.

When I questioned my personal department about this, they told me that the tariff will always stay at the Bern rate, and that I will need to talk to the Luzern tax authority so that they can 'make a correction'. This last part was very vauge, so I am unsure exactly what this now requires - Will I now need to at the end of each financial year request all the tax back from Bern, and then pay what is owed to Luzern?

Am sure there are lots of users on here who have been in this relatively simple situation of paying Quellensteuer and moving Kanton, and I would be grateful to hear what steps were needed to ensure taxes were paid correctly and no unexpected surprises came at the end of the year,

Cheers.... and go the all blacks!

did you de-register from bern and register in luzern and then tell your payroll people about this?

Yes - completed everything formally in terms of the move and registering. The Quellensteuerdomizil on my pay slip has for the past 3 months now been indicated as 'Luzern', so the payroll people are clearly aware that my location has changed.

I am very interested to read the replies you get, as I am also considering a move - out of Kanton Zurich and into Kanton Sankt Gallen. Similarly to you, I would continue working in the same Kanton (Zurich), so if the move happens I'll have to figure out what happens with the Quellensteuer when the Kanton where one lives and the Kanton where one works differ. I'll search around the forum a bit...

Hi Federica,

Just to update on this. I have now spoken with the Tax authorities in Luzern (Kanton of residence). They say it would be much better if the University of Bern (where I work) adjusted the tarif that I pay to the new Luzern rate, but they are not obliged to do so. Therefore what should happen every few months or so, is that all the tax I have paid is transferred from the Bern authorities to the Luzern authorities. They will do a calculation and should provide me with a refund because the Luzern Tarif is less than the Bern Tarif. Or if it was the other way around you would get a regular bill for the outstanding taxes.

So it seems I don't need to do anything further myself, other than hoping that all the calculations are done correctly. I will be able to check, because quellensteuer rates for each Kanton are available online.

Will update again later if things don't work out how I have been told they should.

i'd tell them to change to a lower rate rather than hope you get a refund at the end.

We moved cantons mid-year (BS to BL) and re-registered with the geminde as soon as we did. At the same time, we informed both of our employers who changed the quellensteuer withholding rate to the new BL rate at the same time. So, in theory, the tax withheld should have been appropriate.

At the end of the year, the accountants prepared the tax return – submitting it to our canton as of 31 December. And here’s where it all began to go wrong, despite following the rules to the letter.

Our accountants told us that we had slightly underpaid our tax liability – by about CHF3’000, split roughly equally between BL & BS.

So imagine our surprise when we got a bill for CHF8’000 in underpayment from BS.

Turns out that, despite following the quellensteuer rules and notifying our employers right away, the BS tax authorities disagreed with the way the accountant had split the tax revenue and had used a different allocation. Our net liability was the same (CHF3’000) but we owed an additional CHF8’000 to BS and should be expecting a refund of CHF5’000 from BL.

The moral of the story (and the advice from our accountant) is this: cantonal moves are rarely straight-forward from a tax perspective, and you won’t really know how all the dust settles until you get the final tax assessments from the cantons involved. In our case, this happened almost two years after the tax returns were filed.

Your employer needs to change it period!

Great news, thanks for the update.

Gag

This definitely makes me think twice about moving Kantons...and besides, if I move and they take two years to figure out the taxes, I might have already left the country by then (who knows?) and then it will be a pain to follow up on all this stuff from the other side of the world...
Food for thought for sure!

I have some experience to share here too: I am also taxed at source, and have moved from Solothurn to Zurich sometimes in 2009. Then, in spring 2010, the tax authority (Finanzamt) of ZH sent me the forms for the tax declarations. I knew I did not earn above the limit where you need to make a tax declaration, and I went in person to them and brought them a copy of my tax return (Steuererklärung) for 2009.

All seemed fine, the guy with whom I talked was also puzzled as to why I was considered for tax declaration; he made a copy of my papers, advised I speak to the Kantonal people too (not just the city of Zurich). Which I did. But it didn't help, as I kept receiving reminders (Mahnung) to send said tax declaration...

Well to make a long story short, what had happened is that they had based their calculations on my earnings for the few months in Kanton ZH, and "normalized" that to what I would have earned during the whole year, somehow including the 13th salary as part of the monthly income, and came up with too high numbers. They didn't let me off the hook until I sumbitted a tax declaration - and I am still waiting for their answer on that one, as apparently they owe me some money