Richard Reisch: Interventions on Building-Tax Reform

Published in 1904, these interventions record Richard Reisch’s contributions to the sixth sitting of the inquiry into building-tax reform, held on 25 November 1903. The supplied text is an incomplete extraction of his remarks from official proceedings: the expert’s proposals and replies appear only through Reisch’s questions and objections. Its progression nevertheless reveals a coherent concern. Reform must distinguish actual tax relief from changes in nominal rates, preserve municipal finances, and account realistically for the administrative work required by a new assessment system.

Reisch begins with a question about municipal authority. An expert has credited Linz’s exemption of certain houses in the Landstraße from municipal surcharges with accelerating their reconstruction. Reisch asks whether the municipality could grant this exemption under its ordinary governing provisions or needed legislative authorization. The question establishes the institutional specificity of his approach: an incentive’s apparent success does not settle which authority can lawfully introduce it.

His next intervention addresses the relationship between state building taxes and municipal surcharges assessed upon them. The expert apparently proposes reducing the state tax while retaining its unreduced amount as the basis for local levies. Reisch objects to maintaining tax liabilities in official books solely to calculate surcharges when those liabilities are no longer actually collected. He invokes Article XII of the Personalsteuergesetz as providing for reductions in statutory rates, contrasting this with the existing practice of granting remissions against unchanged rates. Yet aligning the assessment base with the tax actually payable would require higher municipal surcharge percentages to preserve local receipts.

Ich weiß, daß bis zu einem gewissen Grade die Scheu eines jeden Umlagen erhebenden Organes besteht, eine wenn auch nur nominelle Erhöhung der Zuschlagsprozente durchzuführen.

English translation: I know that, to a certain extent, every body levying surcharges is reluctant to implement an increase in surcharge percentages, even if it is merely nominal.

The distinction between a nominal increase and a real burden is central. Reisch recognizes the political difficulty of raising a published percentage even when the taxpayer’s municipal payment remains unchanged. He asks whether this reluctance is practically insuperable or whether the state can reduce its tax without preserving an artificial assessment base. His questioning thus separates administrative consistency, political presentation, and fiscal effect.

He subsequently challenges the expert’s calculation of aggregate relief. A promise that autonomous bodies will retain their existing revenue appears inconsistent with a calculation that includes reductions in municipal surcharges and the disappearance of a ten-percent rent levy. Reisch insists that Reichenberg cannot simply surrender current revenue from property taxes. Moreover, the rent levy is paid by the individual tenant and has no formal connection with the state house-rent tax. Its reduction cannot therefore be counted automatically among the benefits of lowering that tax. His objection concerns both the arithmetic and the institutional linkage presumed by the proposal.

The discussion then turns to the proposed value cadastre. Against an estimated cost of two to three million, supported by analogy with personal-income-tax assessment commissions, Reisch stresses differences in scale and procedure. Income-tax assessment covers 800,000 taxpayers, including thirty percent receiving only a salary and therefore imposing no assessment work on the commission. A building valuation would confront 3,431,000 buildings, predominantly properties subject to the class tax. Establishing their values would require more than calculations from existing income records.

Sobald nun lokale Erhebungen mit ins Spiel kommen, wachsen die Kosten lawinenartig an.

English translation: As soon as local investigations come into play, the costs grow like an avalanche.

This warning rests on administrative experience. Even counting residential components for the class tax can require years of investigation and several commissions. Reisch points to extensive districts and taxpayers’ unwillingness to supply information. His conceptual distinction is between determining income from documentary returns and determining property value: the former offers no adequate precedent for the latter. Consequently, the apparent economy of an existing commission system cannot simply be transferred to a substantially different task.

The final substantial intervention returns to the geographical distribution of revenue. The expert’s scheme apparently assumes that additional buildings will permit reductions in the state tax rate while municipal income remains protected. Reisch identifies an unstated requirement: local allocation of the tax quota would be necessary, because growth in the taxable building stock need not occur in the municipality whose finances are under discussion.

Es ist einfach unmöglich, den Besteuerungszuwachs auf die einzelnen Gemeinden gleichmäßig zu verteilen.

English translation: It is simply impossible to distribute the increase in the taxable base evenly among the individual municipalities.

Even preserving existing receipts would not resolve the problem. Municipalities also depend on revenue growth from new construction; the state’s possible willingness to forgo future increases cannot be attributed to every municipality.

Die Gemeinde bekommt jetzt von diesem Manne 100 fl. und will von ihm auch in Zukunft 100 fl. bekommen.

English translation: The municipality now receives 100 florins from this man and wants to continue receiving 100 florins from him in the future.

Using Reichenberg’s hundred-percent surcharge, Reisch makes the mechanism concrete: a reduced state liability yields reduced municipal receipts unless the surcharge percentage rises. The extraction closes with his brief insistence that the relevant growth must occur within the same municipality. Across these exchanges, his contribution is a sustained test of reform’s conditions of feasibility. Its significance lies in showing how state tax relief, municipal revenue requirements, uneven local development, and valuation costs constrain one another—without the surviving remarks amounting to a complete alternative reform programme.