Did we ever have a thread here on using a GA aircraft for business? 
Peter, we should because if you are worried about losing a per diem based on easy jet snacks, you should be flying yourself!
I fly to Germany every fortnight, though mostly with BA as Lufthansa don’t even attempt to come to London City if there is a PROB30 hint of fog !.
But does this apply only to German Citizens? I’m assuming it is a national tax rather than European. Anyhow all of the food is pretty grim (except the chocolate biscuits) and these days I just sleep throughout the whole flight. I figured I really am not missing anything by not staying awake for their food.
This sounds like the highly dodgy Benefit in Kind tax here in the UK.
Very difficult to enforce on small things, totally impossible to enforce on airline meals (obviously) unless you are a Good Citizen of the Peoples’ Republic of [insert your favourite European socialist State] and you declare it, but a useful tool for an aggressive tax inspector to enable harrassment of a successful businessman who will write him a cheque for 10k to close the “enquiry” and get him off his back, for about 10 years, and then they can start all over again.
many years ago on (german) tax collector told me HIS personal solution to the tax problem:
- All your income is paid directly to the tax collector.
- He then will pay you what the state does not need to “function” in your service…
Or, in modern terms:
If it moves, tax it to death. Once it’s dead, subsidize it.
Who really deducts lunch or dinner invitations from the per diems? Who the hell is ever going to control that?
In our company, about 3000 people travel on a daily basis. We enter our expenses in a travel management system, they are usually reimbursed unverified and only subject to sporadic checks.
In theory, it would be dead easy to implement a fraud management system. With some very simple rules, you can very easily find out about these things on a massive scale.
With regards to per diems reductions, I would first single out those who NEVER deduct anything… highly unlikely that they never get invited, esp. on internal events. I would also compare similar journeys, for example employees who charge the expenses on the same project number. If some deduct and others not, there’s going to be something dodgy going on…
Never going to happen in Germany though, as long as the “Betriebsrat” is in place.
One of the new magic words in German politics is “Steuergerechtigkeit” (“tax justice”). Everybody must be taxed exactly the same way, even if his working conditions are totally different. So if you travel by airline instead of train, you will be given your complimetary snack which the train passenger will not get. This horrible injustice can only be equalled out by making the tax laws even more complicated… If there will ever be anything like a tax harmonisation across the EU, we German taxpayers can only win. Not by paying less taxes than before, but by gaining a lot of time that right now is tied up filling forms and fighting windmills.
In my field of commercial flying, this nightmare started several years ago when the word “breakfast” was not allowed to appear on hotel bills any longer. As we (at least in my company) are entiteled to stay in hotels with a minimum of four stars, a typical hotel breakfast has a value (not really, but this is what they would charge if you bought it separately) of 20 to 30 Euros. Which is way above the per diem and therefore is regarded as an untaxed “hidden benefit” that your employer pays you. The consequence is that we only get hotel rooms without breakfast. On the other hand, our operating manual states that we must not begin duty without proper nutrition. So in real life, in the morning after an overnight stay, we will take a taxi (at company expenses) from the hotel to some Cafe where we have a decent breakfast for a realistic price below ten Euros on our own expense and then another taxi, again at company expenses, from that cafe to the airport… Ridiculously absurd. If the tax office ever finds out that we business aviators, apart from breakfast, mostly feed on the leftovers of some very expensive executive catering they might very likely charge us taxes that exceed our income 
Who deduts ? Me for example. I do not want to get catched for 5.10eur…..and if hotel has breakfast included in rate, it’s easy to check. And there are guys in a country west of europe who are actually checking this….
I just hope the nonsense of considering 25g of solletti a food will not became reality.
It’s Friday night, time to switch off after a challenging week … Thought I would catch up and then read this! We have been trying to deploy our travel and expenses software for our German subsidary for over a year but our works council has raised some lovely data protection arguments. Now I consider myself patient and resilient but it really is incredible what arguments can be raised. I have difficulty in imagining that this legislation would be enforceable in reality. You are right about the betriebsrat.
I also deal with our French subsidiary and by consequent obligation, works council, same thing but different volume, polemic and dynamic. I hope this is not an EU directive (not heard of that). Or the world will truely have gone mad.
Oh joy, so when I return to Bremen, for a week next year, to repeat last weeks’ trip… I will not only have to spend another week depressed that the Germanwings flight cost more than it would have cost me to rent the PA28 and fly myself (I wish I was joking here, but I am serious – I wish my employer saw the savings I could bring)… But I will now have to also moan about the shrivelled tasteless sandwich being taxed.
