Reclaim withholding tax on Irish based ETF?

[Helix]

Well, the USA and Germany even accept a single number (not by country). I don’t see why Swiss authorities couldn’t, if it was calculated correctly.

[Pet]

Couldn’t you fetch all the dividend payment information for underlying companies from ESTV ICTax?

Example: Apple 2023.

There is either XML files for that data, or you could use the web API (JSON) which the website seems to use.

[Helix]

@Pet

Couldn’t you fetch all the dividend payment information for underlying companies from ESTV ICTax?

See:

Reclaim withholding tax on Irish based ETF?

Sorry for wall of text, I really tried to analyze and solve the problem in depth. Analyzing the problem Don’t let yourself be blocked by uncertainty. You can put the uncertainty in a function and implement the more likely (or easier) case first. Ask questions in parallel. If it turns out that the other possibility was correct, you just refactor the implementation of this one function. The rest stays the same, so you can nearly finish all the work without knowing everything. The question itsel…

tl;dr: It is only approximate (in favor of the taxman, though).

[Helix]

@oswand, I think I missed something obvious. The tax administration cares about the dividend at the date of payment in look-through style. It doesn’t matter if the fund redeems with or without, or if they reclaim later or sooner.

We know exactly what they think the dividends were per share. They tell us on ICTax. We also know what those iShare ETFs held on each ex-dividend date. We know how many ETF shares there were and how many of them we held ourselves on ex-dividend and payment. We know which payment days on ICTax correspond to which ex-dividend dates for each stock.

We can calculate this exactly as ICTax claims it is. And this should work for anything that publishes their daily holdings**. Finally, replace the dividend entry in the annual report with the new number, and add any other income tax relevant numbers (e.g., interest). Claim treaty rate tax credit for each country. Now I just need to go live in Lucern* for full tax credit.

Edit: And sorry @Pet for being blind.
Edit 2: Probably still need to apply Irish treaty rates.

Footnotes

* If Finpension’s “positive Rückmeldung” actually means yes.
** Even if you have to scrape their website on each day.

[Abs_max]

Cool.
If you manage to get it for US dividends , it’s already a win

[Pet]

Thanks for thinking about it again That is my understanding as well.

@oswand Do you think you will look into this again? Otherwise it would also be interesting if you could share your existing code so that others could work on it. I think having such a tax statement generator would be a clear win for a lot of people.

[oswand]

The only problem I encountered was, that not all data was available on ICTax. Getting the daily holdings is not a problem, because all services like BlackRock or Vanguard have a “semi”-public API.

[Helix]

@oswand

The only problem I encountered was, that not all data was available on ICTax.

I wonder how Finpension is doing it. Do you have a rough percentage of how much is missing? Also we could just use other public data for the gross dividend of each share they don’t have data for. If they disagree, they can correct the line-item with their own opinion.

[oswand]

@Helix

If they disagree, they can correct the line-item with their own opinion.

I don’t think the tax office will do that for you, lol. AFAIK, Finpension has a parternship with BlackRock for the data. I did contact BlackRock, but they told me they don’t give out the dividends received data (to me at least).

[Helix]

@oswand

I don’t think the tax office will do that for you, lol.

I mean they do that all the time. Often when I file my taxes, they are not ready yet with their valuation of the (non-exchange) securities I hold. I just put down something reasonable (e.g. last years value) and they just correct it.

As stated earlier, there isn’t much to complain about, if we want to pay any taxes on:

1. Gross capital gain distributions, but reduced by a tax credit on a non-existing WHT.
2. Normal gross dividends, but reduced by the minimum of Irish and Swiss WHT, even though we actually paid more WHT for some reasons.

This is all in their favor versus what we would legally owe.

We could also compare the Austrian “Meldefonds” database to see, per country, what was actually withheld. Here (German) for IWRD (iShares MSCI World UCITS ETF).

@oswand

AFAIK, Finpension has a parternship with BlackRock for the data.

I only found this (their article):

Based on data from Blackrock – the company behind iShares – we have developed reporting that should allow you to reclaim more withholding tax on US dividends than ever before.

[Abs_max]

I also think that FP has partnership with Blackrock.
And i noticed that their “invest” offering does not have MSCI World. It has S&P 500 ETF
Maybe that has been done to limit data sharing to specific ETFs.

However, I was thinking when FP submits a report to Zurich tax office & they agree, then why should ICTAX not use the same number for everyone?

Just because FP submits a report does not mean that ishares S&P 500 suddenly had a different income

[Pet]

Then let’s start with the available data. I assume the bigger companies are mostly available on ICTax. I do not think tax offices will have an issue if we apply for less WHT than we would be eligible for. That would allow us at least to validate the approach with the different cantons.