ORF Online reports on annoyed hobby pilots in the Tyrol:

Pilots Annoyed By Bureaucratic Tax
The Tyrol’s hobby pilots are up in arms about a new tax. The eight Euros payable to the Revenue Office involve a huge bureaucratic effort. The pilots demand an end to this tax.

Eight Euros For Carrying A Passenger
The Revenue Office has come up with a new tax for the amateur pilots who mostly fly on weekends. A pilot needs to pay this tax if he carries a passenger, say from Innsbruck to Salzburg.

Four Reports To The Revenue Service Required
In order to collect these eight Euros a complicated procedure has been established. Amateur pilot Christian Magreiter explains, using a trip from Innsbruck to Salzburg as an example: the pilot has to file a report each with the Revenue Offices in Innsbruck and Salzburg, and both airports need to file a report each, as well.

That’s four reports to be filed with the Revenue Office for a weekend flight, for a total sum of eight Euros. The cost of collecting this tax exceeds the income, according to the pilots who demand an end to this tax.

This report speaks of Tyrolean amateur pilots, but presumably this tax is being collected from pilots in all of Austria. Any hope for a repeal of this tax betrays ignorance of how taxation works, since this tax is obviously designed to support the cost cutting and increased efficiency demanded from government departments in the wake of the economic crisis:

Like all of us, civil servants in the Revenue Office expect to be paid for a full work week, regardless of whether they spend their time twiddling their thumbs or receiving and processing reports from pilots and airports. For this reason it is inaccurate to say that the cost of processing these applications reduces the income to zero.

Let’s assume that one man-hour is required to receive and process four such reports: the civil servant dealing with them does so during his normal working hours which he spends at the office anyway and for which he gets paid, regardless of what he does during this time. By processing these four reports, and thus facilitating collection of eight Euros, his cost to the Revenue Office is reduced by eight Euros.

It is irrelevant that both the pilots and the airports also incur costs because of this bureaucratic effort; after all,  that’s what the citizens and their institutions are there for: to work for the civil service — even the Austrian constitution says so:

Austria is a bureaucratic republic. Its law emanates from its bureaucrats. …

You think the problem could be solved differently, for example by reducing the headcount in the Ministry of Finance? Impossible — that would increase the unemployment rate, and besides, why would the Minister of Finance risk a brawl with the head of the Civil Service Union (a fellow “Christian Democrat”)?

Posted on: 21st March, 2011

Filed under: Austrian Politics, Blog English, Politics

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