Robert Meyer: Das Zeitverhältnis zwischen der Steuer und dem Einkommen und seinen Theilen (1901)

Robert Meyer’s work is a single-author legal-financial monograph on Austrian income-tax law, especially § 156 of the 1896 personal-tax statute, with comparative use of Prussian doctrine and administrative jurisprudence. Its immediate occasion is the practical puzzle of “income” or “receipts” that have not existed for a full assessment period; its wider aim is to show that this technical problem exposes a gap in the theory of income itself.

Wo die Steuerverwaltung der Einkommensbildung Schritt für Schritt zu folgen vermag, ist jede Erörterung über den zeitlichen Zusammenhang zwischen Einkommen und Steuer überflüssig.

English translation: Where the tax administration is able to follow the formation of income step by step, any discussion of the temporal relationship between income and tax is superfluous.

The book’s central thesis is that personal income tax cannot ordinarily follow income formation in real time. Because actual income is known only after the economic period closes, tax law must substitute artificial temporal relations—prior-year taxation, multi-year averages, or estimated current income—for the ideal simultaneity between earning and taxation.

Die Identität des Wirtschaftsjahres und des Steuerjahres schwebt uns als kategorischer Imperativ vor.

English translation: The identity of the economic year and the tax year stands before us as a categorical imperative.

Meyer’s first section distinguishes the tax year from the economic or income year and rejects two simplifying solutions: merely postponing assessment, and declaring that the tax object is simply the income of the tax year. Both, he argues, conceal rather than solve the temporal mismatch. The three practical methods each have defects: current-year estimation is timely but uncertain; prior-year assessment is real but delayed; average assessment smooths losses but exaggerates delay. Hence no method is a principle in itself.

Denn keiner dieser Grundsätze ist an und für sich wertvoll, sondern jeder von ihnen ist ein Rothbehelf und nur so lange und insoweit anzuwenden, als er zu befriedigenden Resultaten führt.

English translation: For none of these principles is valuable in and of itself; rather, each of them is a makeshift expedient, to be applied only so long and to the extent that it leads to satisfactory results.

The second section applies this to beginning and ending fragments of income. A new inheritance, office, business, or pension cannot be treated as if it had supplied a whole prior year; nor should extinguished income continue to be taxed merely because it existed in the assessment base. Meyer’s key move is to defend annualization under § 156(2) for newly existing income, while linking it to the non-taxation of later fragments after the income has ceased.

Allen drei Berechnungsmethoden ist gemeinsam, die Anfangsstücke im Entstehungsjahre freizulassen, dagegen die Endstücke mindestens in diesem Jahre mit der Steuer für einen vollen Jahresertrag zu treffen.

English translation: Common to all three methods of calculation is that they leave the initial fragments in the year of origin free, whereas the final fragments are, at least in that year, hit with the tax for a full annual yield.

The third and most theoretical section argues that this solution requires distinguishing parts of total income. Meyer criticizes both an atomistic focus on “Einnahmen und Ausgaben” and a rigid doctrine of the unity of income. Legal practice must work with identifiable income partials—business yield, salary, rent, interest, dividends—because economic life itself is organized through them.

Offenbar gebrauchen wir da das Wort Einkommen in einem doppelten Sinne, das einemal zur Bezeichnung des Ganzen, das anderemal der Theile.

English translation: Evidently we use the word 'income' here in a double sense, at one time to denote the whole, at another to denote the parts.

Against the abstract unity of income, Meyer insists that income-parts are economically prior: households and taxpayers adjust consumption, saving, and obligations when particular income streams rise, fall, begin, or end. Total income is therefore a necessary tax abstraction, not the living unit of economic action.

Die Entwicklung der Einkommensteile ist der reelle, die wirtschaftlichen Verfügungen wirklich beeinflussende Vorgang; die Einheit des Einkommens ist die Abstraction, die das, was im Laufe des Jahres geschehen, reflectierend zusammenfasst.

English translation: The development of the components of income is the real process that actually influences economic dispositions; the unity of income is the abstraction that reflectively sums up what has occurred in the course of the year.

This leads to his critique of the Prussian “source theory.” Meyer accepts its practical insight—that individual income streams must be distinguished—but rejects its claim that taxation turns simply on whether a source still exists. The same source can yield different income, and different legal forms can replace one another economically.

Die Quellenstheorie ist gegenüber der Erscheinung verschiedenen, sei es gleichzeitigen oder aufeinanderfolgenden Einkommens aus derselben Quelle nicht zu halten.

English translation: The source theory cannot be maintained in the face of the phenomenon of diverse—whether simultaneous or successive—income from the same source.

The final section extends the analysis to the rent tax, where deduction at source poses no timing problem, but declaration-based taxation repeats the same issues in simplified form. Meyer closes with a draft revision of § 156, replacing vague references to receipts with rules for income parts, temporary income, new income, extinguished income, and deductible expenses. The work’s relevance lies in its fusion of tax administration, legal interpretation, and income theory: it shows that timing rules are not technical afterthoughts but constitutive of what taxable income means.