Yes. And tax (wo)man told me to add it manually.
I had problems where when manually adding an ISIN, when not recognised, the system doesn’t accept it and will not allow submission.
1 Like
I was wondering shouldn’t it be treated as „tax free“ gift rather than income?
As far as I know gifts below 5000 CHF from individuals are tax free. And free shares are kind of gifts because they get originated due to promotional activities or referral from friends.
Do you have a link for the 5k from individual?
I searched quite a bit yesterday and couldn’t find anything saying that promotional activities, etc. would be exempt, except that people apply common sense and if it’s 1) a one off 2) small compared to regular income, the tax people won’t care. (same as not declaring very small cash value, etc. people apply common sense)
(but I think otherwise it’s not actually a gift, it’s a reward and those are taxed, it’s a “revenu accessoire” in French)
edit: fyi for a company gifting their employees, the limit is 500 CHF, above that it has to show up in the Lohnausweis.
edit: also it’s not a gift, since there was a counterparty (the referral or the usage of the service)
For 5K I am just referring to tax free gift limits applied at ZH canton level.
Note -: this is over lifetime and not every year
Also that’s for actual gifts from people.
So I should just put it in gift section or in other income section?
It’s like 400 CHF
As I mentioned above, afaik it’s income, but I personally wouldn’t bother for those low amounts (do people also declare their voucher gifts, etc.?)
Yeah I was wondering how about people getting discount vouchers for Batmaid. It’s the same thing in a way.
The only difference is that it shows up in my asset list , so I need to add it somehow. I used Freeshare option for now.
I will make a comment that it’s free share based on promotion and let tax office decide
1 Like
The “system” tells you to put the ISIN at the end of the name of the company if they don’t find it. You cannot put it into the ISIN field if they don’t have it in their database.
When I was a few years younger I thought that they maybe add the securities the next year… they don’t. Because those are the Kanton guys and the database is maintained by the Switzerland guys.
You can write them and tell them the ISIN of the securities not in the database. The address was already posted a few times. I usually use the form on the admin.ch ICTax page but cannot find it at the moment, sorry.
1 Like
I’ll do the same. If we won’t get the same outcome, we would have proof that ZH taxes are not deterministic. 
1 Like
In the BaselLand software, they changed the setting last year so that you can’t have a blank ISIN field and an unrecognised ISIN is not accepted. I think next time, I’ll submit the additional ones on paper or in the additional notes field and let them deal with it.
At least in SZ it’s clearly stated that free/promotional shares must be added to income, although it could be argued that if the amount is small enough, it’s of no consequence not to declare it.
Free Shares
As of 1. As of January 1, 2020, non-cash benefits from the purchase of free shares and increases in the value of free shares will be taxed as income at the cantonal level, as in the case of direct federal tax, at the time of allocation or increase. These benefits must be listed in the list of securities and assets.
i see. Looks like I need to declare IBKR shares in two sections. I doubt ZH and SZ will be different in this aspect.
- Security section to get them in asset list
- Other income section to account for value at time of award
Thanks for sharing
At least the database is maintained on a Switzerland level. They could save about 95% of the costs and have way better software by using the same with a few Kanton specific parameters.
But seriously, if you write the guys they usually put the ISIN into the database in less than 24 hours.
1 Like
Unfortunately, last year I was doing on the last possible day after extending twice. There was no time to get ISIN updated 
If you get a message that the “ertrags” (dividends or so) are not yet there, be ready to refill all the fields. That happened to me. I think sometimes zhtax don’t get all the info in time or something like that. There was a warning the day I filled it.
1 Like
Is there not an option to ‘refresh’ the data?
didn’t see it but it might have had the same result.
It’s not super reliable for me (or I haven’t figured out). Sometimes just opening the entry refreshed it, sometimes searching for the security did the trick.
(But there’s still one entry where it didn’t refresh, while ictax data is there and was entered early Feb)