Just filled in my tax return for 2020 - on time for once - and I've noticed that on previous tax returns we've had field 800 (Wertschriften- und Guthabenverzeichnis) increased by the tax office from what we've declared. The note they've put for this field says:

Kurskorrekturrn nicht kotierter Titel (nähere Angaben erhalten Sie von Bewertungsstelle der Gessellschaft oder des Sitzkantons der Gesellschaft),

(Price corrections of unlisted securities (for further details, please contact the company's valuation office or the canton in which the company is domiciled according to deepl).

It's not urgent, since this affects wealth tax and I'm not yet rich enough for that. But I'm curious if anyone knows what this is about. We have a mixture of shares on the US, Swiss and UK stock markets. Otherwise it's 2 UK bank account and a handful of Swiss ones.

When we get our next statement, if they've made a similar adjustment, we'll call up. But if anyone knows what this is about, then maybe I can figure out what I've been doing wrong and correct it for 2020.

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It was a six figure correction. I mean ok, if I was trading on the Zimbabwean stock market and got the decimal point in the wrong place...

The correction refers to securities not listed on the stock market, do you have anything like that? This could be any securities of companies that are not traded at least once a week. If not I would look at stuff that was not listed on the ICTax list in 2020.

They're all listed on proper stock exchanges - mainly SIX, Nasdaq and NYSE. But they're not in ICTax. E.g. BLUEBIRD BIO ORD ISIN US09609G1004
NKN: 21433245 is on Nasdaq. Current price $181.25

It looks posible that they don't see these on their database, so they just make up their own valuation. The extra is always a round figure - always in 1000s, never hundreds or tens or units. It's way more than the actual valuation.

If it is a non-listed stock, the agregate value of the stock is rounded down (up?) to the next 1000. The valuation of non-listed stock is based on a mixture of company profits (ertragswert) and assets (substanzwert). There are guidelines on how to do this (and there are two different ways to do it. I hold shares in a non-listed company and I am always surprised at the resulting valuation... (https://www.steuerkonferenz.ch/downl...20191213_D.pdf not sure if this is the most up to date version).

For start-up companies a different approach might apply (cf. for Zurich: https://www.zh.ch/de/steuern-finanze...zstb-39-1.html).

However, if you only have listed stocks I would be surprised to see a correction (in particular since the tax office would need to now the "ertragswert" and "substanzwert"). Possibly they have an internal database for certain stocks they consider non-traded. In any event, I would challenge such a correction by submitting screenshots of the stock price on 31.12.

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