Bastiaan en Lily's blog

Whow, this was a hefty week on the subject of Dutch Tax. My heart sank to an absolute low in the middle of the week but the end result seems to be a positive conclusion after all.

So earlier in the week the copy of my tax statement finally arrived in the mail nearly 1 month after it had been requested. This was the first oppertunity I had to actually look at the figures and my heart initially sank.

As I write before my conversation with the tax department had amounted in the conclusion that the rules for double tax hadn't been applied but there was a, "Totaal vrijstelling in het buitenland belast inkomen" which loosely translates to "Total amount of tax not required to be paid due to foreign income".

So it had been calculated! Could this mean the tax statement was correct after all? Reading the tax statement a little closer I found out that the tax deduction had indeed been applied to my taxable income. There is however another substantial part of the tax statement and that is the part "Premie volksverzekeringen". This is the premium you pay for the combined insurances handled by the government including thing like disability, pension, unemployement, and loads more. This is actually a staggering 31% of the first 32.000 euro's you earn (other rates apply when you don't earn as much) but it is for a good cause because this is the money that makes Holland such a good place to live in, if you loose your job or you are unable to work or there is some other bad thing that happens to you, the government social security system provides great safety nets.

You off course pay this over the year and that nicely balances out at the end of the year, but I've been living abroad for 7 months and haven't paid this at all and now I suddenly have to cough up 7 months of premiums. What is worse yet, I'm paying for similar insurances here in Australia and I would no longer have been entitled to any benefits from Holland if I had indeed lost my work/been unable to work/etc.

Now in this lies the clue, if you are leaving Holland for a short time you can opt to keep paying these premiums and stay covered. In some cases this is even mandatory and you will need to apply for tax cuts in the country you now live in to ensure you aren't paying double. Because of this there are another few pages of difficult questions to answer on your tax return and I realized I must have made mistakes here that caused the tax department to apply these premiums for a full year.

So needless to say here I am again on the phone with the Tax department but by this time the tax department had already rolled back my earlier statement and the guy on the phone simply couldn't tell me anything. I feel a bit sorry for him for by this time I'd gotten pretty frustrated and must admit, wasn't showing my best behaviour anymore (he wasn't to friendly himself I must admit, maybe he read I've called the tax department nearly weekly over the past month and wasn't looking forward to dealing with me, I don't know).

At the end of the day, I was none the wiser and fearing the worst.

Today, Friday, the last day of the week happy news arrived though. I received the revised temporary tax statement that I had been told about was send to me and low and behold, I've received it within 7 days after it was send!

The revised statement shows that there is no longer an outstanding amount. It shows that they have revised the premium I mentioned above, I'm not sure what conditions they applied to this. It looks like they have based the premiums on me living in Australia for 6 months and the amount has been halved (I took nearly 1 month off to be with Lily's family but I guess they don't include that eventhough I left Holland after 5 months...). The end result is that I'm probably getting a few hundred euro's back. They have brought the amount to 0 for now due to the nature of this statement but who knows.. Atleast it finally is some good news!

I still have a 14 euro late fee to pay (over an amount I never owed in the first place) and a 7 euro late fee to pay (over the other statement that I paid to late) but c'est la vie.. All though I disagree with the amounts I can follow the reasoning behind it and since in the end it looks like I brought the whole ordeal on my own head I guess it is fair.