Too much paranoia here while too little in other places…
If IBKR gets hacked, many billions may get stolen. If Datalevel gets hacked, the data the taxman knows probably gets public. Depending on the Kanton this data is public anyhow…
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My point was, if you don’t trust Datalevel, then do you trust IBKR not to have a data leak? There isn’t a simple answer. the more places your data is at the bigger the attack surface, but you also have to look at the risks of each 3rd party. I would trust cantonal tax authorities the least in terms of data security TBH.
from google
Key Data Leaks in Switzerland
Suisse Secrets (2022): Leaked data from Credit Suisse involving over 30,000 clients and 18,000 accounts holding over 100 billion CHF. It revealed accounts held by, or for, alleged human rights abusers, corrupt officials, and criminals.
Pandora Papers (2021): Revealed that Swiss financial advisors and consultants, such as Fidinam, helped set up thousands of shell companies to manage assets, exposing the role of Swiss intermediaries in global financial structures.
Swiss Leaks (2015): Information provided by whistleblower Hervé Falciani revealed that HSBC Private Bank (Suisse) facilitated tax evasion for over 100,000 clients.
Concevis Hack (2023): A ransomware attack on a software provider to the Swiss Federal Tax Administration and the Department of Defence, Civil Protection and Sport (DDPS) resulted in an “extensive outflow of data,” including some on the darknet.
This is the issue. You always have a risk with your broker. Adding another party adds additional risk. You can’t avoid the broker risk (since you will always have a broker) but you can avoid the DataLevel risk as that is optional.
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Back to subject: found an error in the Datalevel documents.
If U.S. stocks are lent out the short seller must pay the dividend. This is marked as “in lieu of dividends”. If this is an U.S. company, the withholding tax is deducted and has to go into DA1. It didn’t, it was marked as “no withholding tax deducted”.
The situation is a bit more complicate for non-U.S. stocks. But not even the tax office is able to handle that situation correctly, I gave up after years of telling them. If a non-U.S. stock is lent out and the dividend is paid by the short seller, no withholding tax is deducted. But if not all stocks are lent out the part that is not lent out gets withholding tax deducted. Until now I just put them too under DA1 and mentioned the situation in the comments. I suppose the taxman loses much much money with that kind of Cum-Ex situation.
Too bad that this thread is separated from the discussion about the opensteuerauszug, would be interesting to see how this situation is handled there.
I did inform Datalevel.
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It would be interesting to check. If you can create a flex query for last year, and extract all the relevant lines for an affected instrument, you can post it in the other thread. Then we can give it a try. I am not sure if that use-case is handled yet, but would definitely interesting to add support for it.
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I just checked the details. It is not the Datalevel report that is wrong, it was the IBKR report that I created. Somehow dividends of another year were contained and that made me think it was an error.
Indeed all the “in lieu of” dividends and the withholding tax was correct.
I’m getting old, this year it would probably have taken me more than 4 hours to find all the errors…
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I had five line to import with and of course the main one VT is missing with it’s 18 purchases and dividends. Not the end of the world but frustrating.
I wrote to their support and they replied very fast with a screenshot of a successful import on the Argau software.
So they say it’s a VSTAX problem. I will now write to them!
This is my first post because I am so happy about the service which Datalevel provides to receive a certified e-Steuerauszug for my entire portfolio with IBRK. I don’t want to write down here the entire service they provide for 50 Francs. Just three tidbits: 1/ Sign-up was no issue, 2/ I have no privacy concern with making them my administrator on IBRK. Administrator is a misleading term because the administrator only has read rights, which data level requires to extract my holdings. And 3/ from making them my administrator to receiving my e-Steuerauszug to import into e-Tax took exactly 1 week. This was one of the better invested 50 Fr. this year.
Their website (search IBRK datalevel) is quite complete and you can find all information there. Great Q&A. They extract all from your annual report and this avoids the manual transcription and conversions which I was used to. I compared their results with a few of my stocks and the amounts match. Well done Datalevel.
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