No change to the final tax assessment in the event of a ‘misclick’

Oct 30, 2025

In its ruling of 18 July 2023, the Federal Finance Court (BFH) decided that incorrect data imported into the ELSTER portal for the purpose of preparing a tax return is not a correctable clerical error, but rather an error in content if the erroneous data import is transmitted to the tax office.

Put simply, in the case decided by the BFH, the taxpayers had received a tax assessment notice with an excessive tax back payment after submitting their tax return via the ELSTER portal. When submitting the tax return, they had not noticed that they had imported the values from the previous year and had also entered the values for the current tax year for part of their income. The tax office had also failed to notice the error.

The taxpayers did not lodge an appeal against the tax assessment notice issued later, but wanted to achieve a change to their tax return in advance by other means and, as a result, also to the tax assessment notice still to be issued.

Both in the first and second instances, the taxpayers lost on the grounds that the law does not provide for corrections in such cases. A digital ‘mishap’ cannot be compared to a mechanical typing error, for which there is a correction option.

The tax office may also make changes at any time if this increases the taxpayer's tax burden, but not if it reduces it.

Regardless of the fact that an appeal can only be lodged once a notice has been issued, the advice of a tax advisor should always be sought in such cases.