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DISCLAIMER: Any opinion expressed by a contributor is to be considered his/her own personal opinion, not the opinion of any other swiss-list member, the swiss-list website managers or the swiss-list committee.
All,
The write-up below is also available online here:
http://erik.bruchez.name/roller/page/ebruchez/20050625#the_swiss_military_tax
Enjoy,
-Erik
-- The Swiss army is a funny thing. Well, that's a way of speaking, of course. Switzerland, in spite of being a small country (about 7.5 million people at the time of writing), and neutral since the 17th century, has a long military tradition. Swiss children learn in school of the legendary William Tell, and of how young kids were trained to fight since an early age. The Swiss kicked the Habsburg out in 1315 and became an independent country, fought off the French and the Italians as well, until they got our own ass kicked by the French in Marignan in 1515. They have a long tradition of working as mercenaries as well. And finally, everybody knows about the Swiss Guards of the Vatican, who have been in this role from 1506 to the current days. Nowadays one fairly well-known particularity of the Swiss army is that it is mostly a militia army. Every Swiss male is supposed to serve in the army for a total of about 300 days, split between an initial recruits school of about 120 days, then doing some further training typically every other year (details may vary). You can postpone training if you have good reasons, like university exams and the like. But every Swiss male who is required to serve in the army but doesn't must pay a tax, which amounts to 2% of his income (3% since 2004). Now when you move abroad, as I did back in 1997, you notify the army of this fact and you obtain a military permission. Here is the catch though: you have to pay the military tax for the first three full years of your stay abroad (you don't pay the tax for the following years). When you leave your country, this is the last thing on your mind. When I moved back to Switzerland in late 2004, I first got in the mail a letter asking me if I was volunteering to join back the army (after six years abroad, you no longer need to serve in the army, unless you explicitly volunteer for it). Of course I denied this kind offer. But then a few months ago I got in the mail some forms related to paying my tax for the years 1998 and 2000. This caused a little shock, since I didn't even remember that I was supposed to be paying that tax. It is also hard to comprehend why this tax has to be paid, since as a Swiss working in the US, you pay your taxes in the country where you earn your money, based on a treaty between both countries. The military tax is an exception to this rule. After receiving those tax forms I quickly added up numbers and the worst-case scenario amounted to quite a lot of money. A good citizen, I declared my actual income, providing copies of my W-2 forms. The good news, it turned out, is that I have to pay only for the years 1998 and 2000 (because I was not required to serve in 1999); that the 2% rate applies to me, not the 3% rate; that you get a discount depending on the number of days of service you have done in the past (the recruits school, for example); and finally, that after all I did not make that much money in 1998, as I was working in my first job in the US, and less in 2000, when we were working on starting up Orbeon. In the end I owe about CHF 2000. It could have been much worse. But as a resident of the United States for seven years, quite a lot of my money went into financing the US military, and I wish my tax money could go help people who need it rather than the Swiss army. -- _______________________________________________ Swiss-list mailing list Swiss-list_at_swiss-list.com http://www.swiss-list.com/mailman/listinfo/swiss-listReceived on Sat Jun 25 2005 - 17:35:54 PDT