Declaring dividends for only part of the year? (new tax-payer)

Taxes
1

Hi!
We arrived in Zurich in July 2018. I am taxed at source with my husband, but getting dividends for ETFs and Reits (which we have with brokers in Singapore).
I started to use the Private Tax 2018 CD-Rom I found at my Gemeinde, but I am stuck on the dividends for the page on Wertschriften…Verzeichnis:
If I enter the ISIN for my VEUR or VWRL, I can do the search for the Swiss Valoren number, and the system then provides automatically the 4 yearly dividends in CHF with payment dates…which is great, except that I should be taxed only on the latest two dividends, as I arrived in July.

I am thinking of 3 solutions, but all with potential issues:

  1. I discovered I could bypass this by “pretending” I bought my units in June 2018 just before coming to Switzerland (entering a fictitious Zugang date), although I bought everything several years ago. This way the first two dividends for the year show 0.
    Would I run into trouble by pretending I bought the units in 2018 just to amend the dividends and avoid taxation before my arrival in Switzerland? I am worried about:
    -being accused of false declaration, even if this is in order to reach proper, exact taxation.
    -Even worse, being considered as a trader rather than an individual investor and taxed more, because my total buying in 2018 might look huge and exceed 5 times what I would seem to have at the beginning of the year (although I have nor sold anything in 2018)

  2. Alternatively, I could just ignore and not use the ISIN and Valoren numbers, and just enter the description of VEUR and VWRL, manually entering the dividends myself since July 2018. Would this be a better solution, and am I allowed to leave the Valoren-Nr and ISIN blank?

  3. Should I just do everything on paper?

Thanks for helping, and thank you so much for all the brilliant answers on this site, I have learned so much from everybody!

2

I would not recommend solution Nr.1 as you are knowingly providing false information.

I would go with solution Nr.2.

If thats possible with the tax software, yes give it a shot.

I have never done anything on paper, wouldn’t know how. If all fails, you could call up your gemeinde and explain the situation to them

3

Thank you for your prompt and helpful answer Joey! I’ll try solution 2 and will check with Gemeinde or most probably with a tax adviser if correct. My Gemeinde was not so helpful last time I asked questions and advised me to see a tax advisor as my German is quite basic…I’ll feed back the advisor’s advice to the Mustachians when I get it end of March. Still trying to do as much as possible by myself, with Google translate support to minimise the tax adviser’s cost!

4

Coming back after visiting a tax adviser. I had finally decided to do my tax return on paper this year as it was a split year, and we didn’t want our dividends to be taxed for the earlier part of the year before we were in Zürich (see my previous posts). Thanks to all the infos I had found on this Mustachian site, and thanks to Google Translate, my paper tax return was mostly correct, I am glad to say, and I greatly limited the expense by solving the remaining issues in less than an hour with the tax adviser!
She confirmed that for a split year after arriving in Switzerland, I could do it on paper to avoid the problem of the automatic 4 dividends in the on-line version. There are also less questions asked on the paper version, I found. We only have about 12 securities, so it was not too “taxing” to fill in manually.
She gave us useful advice about some deductions, however, she told us we had to divide some of the Pauschal deductions by 2 as we arrived middle of 2018. Can’t have it both way, unfortunately: not declaring earlier dividends and claiming Pauschal deductions for the whole year (e.g. the Versicherungsprämien, where she made me write manually: Steuerplicht vom 1.7.2018: 1/2 and the divided Prämien under C.Abzug.
Also, she told us we had to attach copies of all the 31th December 2018 bank statements showing cash amounts, total securities held, as well as interests/dividends for the period. I was surprised as some earlier posts I had read said to keep the statements in case the tax office asked, but not to send them.
Basically, as we own more than 200,000 CHF in assets and get quite a few dividends, we had to fill in all the papers the tax office sent us: Steuererklärung, Wertschriften-…verzeichnis, Versicherungsprämien, and the Berufsauslagen for all the possible work-related deductions, without forgetting to attach the Lohnausweise from our employers. The Lohnausweise mention the Quellensteuer (tax already deducted from salary), but just to make sure, she made me add on page 4 in 60. Bemerkungen:
"Bezahlte Quellensteuer: _______(the amount of tax already payed as per the Lohnausweise)
She said the tax office will deduct it from the total tax to be paid.
Hope this helps. But for our first Steuererklärung, and basic German, we were glad to have it checked in a hour by a professional tax advisor as it is really easy to miss a few things!

5

The tax software or portal is usually bad as it expects you are taxable the whole year, the dividend is paid only once per year and you have the same amount of titles at each dividend payment. In spite of these difficulties, I do not think this is a good reason, to fill the tax declaration on paper in a society in which digitization of public services is a high priority. (I must admit here that I am not good friend with tax advisers and fiduciary companies)
If the software is unable to provide the correct numbers I make the sum by hand on a spreadsheet. This is a usual problem for me as the number of ETF held is changing frequently as I keep investing and the dividend is paid four time per year.
In my canton (Bern) the rule is to provide no documents except the documents explicitly required. All documents not required are immediately sent back without even consultation by the tax office. If they think they need any documents they ask for them later.

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