U-turn in Berlin - old deadline remains
Everything had actually already been decided: Banks, insurance companies and securities institutions would have to keep accounting documents for much shorter periods in future. The traffic light government wanted to reduce bureaucracy and ease the burden on the economy. But now the political brakes have been applied. On Wednesday, the federal government decided that the retention period would remain at ten years after all.
Official justification: Only with such long deadlines would it be possible to effectively prosecute major tax fraud cases in the future. The scandals surrounding "cum-cum" and "cum-ex" - financial tricks in which the state was cheated out of billions - are mentioned in particular.
Lessons from a billion-dollar fraud
Anyone who remembers cum-ex knows how perfidious these deals were: Banks, funds and investors shifted shares and dividend entitlements back and forth around the dividend record date in such a way that capital gains tax was refunded several times - for taxes that had never been paid.
The damage for the German tax authorities: billions. The investigations dragged on for years because the transactions were extremely convoluted. It was not until 2021 that the Federal Court of Justice finally ruled that cum-ex is punishable. Without a long retention period, many crucial documents would have long since ended up in the shredder.
Catastrophic wrong decision" corrected
Former cum-ex chief investigator Anne Brorhilker criticized the planned shortening of the retention period early on. She spoke of a "catastrophically wrong decision". Without sufficiently long retention periods, complex tax evasion could simply no longer be fully investigated.
Brorhilker sees the fact that the government is now backtracking as proof that public pressure can have an effect. In fact, media reports and comments from the financial supervisory authority had repeatedly pointed out how dangerous the shortening would be.
What is changing now - and what is not
The originally shortened deadlines came into force at the beginning of 2025. For banks, insurance companies and securities institutions, the changeover was to follow at the beginning of 2026. With the new decision, however, the previous ten years will remain in place.
For the financial sector, this still means high archiving and IT costs - but from the point of view of investigators and tax investigators, it is an indispensable tool. After all, it often takes years to reconstruct suspicious flows, especially in the case of international financial transactions.
Critics of the extension argue that smaller institutions in particular are financially burdened by long retention periods. But supporters see things differently: the costs for archives are negligible compared to the damage caused by tax tricks such as cum-ex.
U-turn was overdue
Shortening the deadlines would have primarily helped those who play for time - and these are rarely the honest ones. Those who siphon off billions in a cum-ex manner rely on evidence disappearing at some point. That must not happen. Ten years is not too long, but realistic. In a world in which financial transactions move around the globe at the click of a mouse, the justice system also needs time to keep pace. And if a few bankers and insurers have to buy more storage space to do so - so be it.
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