Great idea, that way you can moan you pay too much tax

Only the majority of those who actually voted wanted this solution. I doubt that everyone who did not or could not vote wanted it. If everyone had have and could have voted (as with so many other votes) the result may have been different.

If it was included in general taxation like most other things, then there would be far less complaints about it. Generally it is extra, separate and special charges for specific things that generate uproar and complaints. If it was paid for using money collected from income tax, people would notice it much less, some not at all.
In essence it is the way it has been and still is collected and charged which is the problem.

That's the way it is, nationals can vote, others can't


You could say the same about any vote


Hands up those who wanted the UK to remain in the UK


Hands up those who wanted Hilary as president


The list is very very long

But many don't. Turnout is always quite low.

I quite agree with you, Curley. Only a cheapskate would be concerned about an overcharge of less than CHF 2 on their first bill. But the end result of charging CHF 365/12 per month instead of CHF 1 per day (as stated on Serafe's website) in all the first bills would be to overcharge the population well over CHF 2.5 million. (Taking into account that Group 1 households pay the correct sum, and Group 2's like yourself even benefit from a small discount). Surely Serafe should compensate for this in some way in the second bill, as suggested by Urs Max?

That idea won't fly, I'm afraid. As I explained in my personalized illustration, the first bill is for a part of the year 2019: from 1 January to the day before the regular annual billing date. If your billing date (every year from now on) is 1 May, then you will receive/have received in January 2019 a bill for the four months from 1 January to 30 April, inclusive, for CHF (4/12*365), which must be paid in full.

Your next bill, which in the example above would arrive around 1 May 2019, is not for "the rest of the year". It is the first of your annual bills covering the 12 calendar months from 1 May to 30 April the following year, so unless the fee changes, every one of those annual bills will be for CHF 365 and again, must be paid in full.

+1. Serafe is simply the fee collector, doing the bidding of the majority of Swiss voters who decided that broadcast entertainment should be funded this way. Moaning about Serafe and calling the annual fee "the Serafe" is like blaming Swisscom for the death of your great aunt, because you learned about her passing when a relative called you on the phone.

So much heartache over a complete non-issue!

The simple fact is that the annual fee is CHF 365, as explained by the Swiss government in DE/FR/IT. It is not "CHF 1 per day". That is a convenient marketing phrase used by Serafe. Sure, they could have said that "the fee averages out to CHF 1 per day, even less in non-leap years", but that doesn't roll as easily off the tongue.

The Serafe billing period is a minimum of one month (January 2019), with the bill size increasing in whole-month increments, so it makes sense to calculate the average payment per month and use that as the basis for every bill.

This is exactly analagous to the payment of salaries. Many of us work on permanent contracts, for an annual salary. If that salary is paid monthly (let's say the employer doesn't pay a "13th salary"), we receive exactly 1/12 of the annual salary every month. We don't receive less in February. We don't get paid more in August than in September. If we start at the company on 1 January and quit two months later on 28 February, we receive a total of 2/12 of our annual salary, not 59/365!

"Yes, yes", as I corrected 13 hours before this post of your's.

Yes, this describes it very well, You should have added ".. when they have their phone-connection via cablecom".

What is rather strange about this heart-aching non-issue is that Serafe don't simply issue their first bills for CHF 31, 59, 90, 120, etc. Then their "CHF 1 per day" convenient marketing phrase publicity would not be off by over CHF 2.5 million, the households allotted to the different groups would all be treated fairly, and they wouldn't have to fiddle with rounding the bills for the different groups up and down to 5ct levels while trying to get the overall charge to correspond at least approximately with CHF 365 per year.

Guess as it's a payment per household, adding it to individuals tax would cause other issues/complaints.

Including rather than adding is key, less noticeable that way. Plenty of other things are covered/financed with money from income tax (which not everyone necessarily uses or benefits from), this just happens to be something that is charged separately hence all of the issues and complaints, not to mention payment avoidance.

There's no ideal solution, but including the financing of the broadcasting services in income tax would also have eliminated the extra overheads involved in separate individual billing. Serafe hoped to fulfil their mandate with 37 people in Zurich. But they've had to contract with Callpoint to set up a call centre in the Billag building in Fribourg with 50-60 people (partly ex-Billag employees) to reply to billing complaints and questions from the public.

Ludicrous. Another example of vast amounts of public money being wasted.

This kind of stuff makes one feel like in the zoo, watching a very, very strange species with fascination.
Grown people wanting their spinach hidden in the fishsticks.

But spinach hidden in fish fingers is nice.
I'm not saying I personally want the Serafe charge hidden in income tax. I'm saying if it were, there would be much lower costs (invoicing) overall and fewer complaints to deal with. This thread and the Billag threads would also not have existed if it had been like this from the outset.

How many years did it take Switzerland to realise that the Billag system itself (with the checking up on people to try to catch them watching TV without paying the fee) needed to go?
And now that it has changed, people are still not happy and there are still the same old problems.

Indeed.

Tom

The whole Billag system, along with the equivalents in countries such as the UK and Germany, that basically rely on dodgy people ringing doorbells to talk punters into paying up (and punching the occasional uncooperative pensioner on the nose), is rather bizarre if not awkwardly uncizilized and can't even really be explained in terms of it being a relic of history as it always was bizzare, even in the days when black and white TV was as state of the art as the horse and cart.

In my view it was really about having a tax without calling it a tax. So governments could show off their low tax rates while having de facto taxes that don't count as taxes. In other words, dishonesty by the government. But rather than coming clean and calling it a tax and charging it as a tax, they have invented this new system that is essentially the old bizzare system with supercharged powers.

I think even with the amount in CH recently being lowered a couple of times, it is still quite high. The German one is almost half the Swiss charge for example.

Anecdotally, shortly after I bought my first TV set in Switzerland in 1969 an official looking gentleman called at my door and announced that he was a "Radio/TV Inspector". I dutifully showed him my TV licence, but it was only when he asked me to sign a document that I discovered that he was actually a door-to-door salesman for a Radio/TV magazine, trying to sign me up for a subscription!

At the time the TV licence cost CHF 7 per month, plus CHF 5 for the initial registration. It was levied by the PTT, and simply added to your monthly telephone bill. Simple and efficient.

So only people with phones had to pay? And what if you only had a radio?