A man mistakenly received 1,700 letters from tax authorities in Germany

Letters from tax authorities have also been annoying, but a nightmare unfolded for one taxpayer in Germany that probably wasn't like anything you've ever had to face. A man received 1,700 letters from German tax authorities.

The reason why a resident of Quickborn, a town near Hamburg received 1,700 letters from the tax authorities in Germany came down to a clerical error of all things. But it was a really big one!

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So what caused the problem? The switch to wintertime. The individual in question had requested access to Germany's tax portal between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. on the night of October 26th to the 27th.

Photo: Ales Nesetril / Unsplash

While the man was supposed to receive an access code by post. However, Germany was changing from daylight savings time to standard time on October 26th, and this time change caused a bug and the request was processed repeatedly, without anyone being able to stop it.

Photo: Alina Grubnyak / Unsplash

The processing of such tax requests is fully automated throughout Germany and there is no human control according to a spokesperson for regional authorities, who was quoted by France Info.

Photo: Chris Yang / Unsplash

As a result, the taxpayer concerned received roughly 1,700 letters from the tax authorities in Germany, which were deposited in ten yellow boxes at a  post office.

"At first I was really scared," he told the local newspaper Flensburger Tagesblatt according to a Google translation of his comments that were published by Fraceinfo, and you can probably understand why!

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"Coming from the IRS, you don't expect a mistake. You're more likely to think you've made a mistake," the man added.

A regional spokesperson for Germany's tax authority explained that "the Ministry of Finance has contacted the taxpayer and apologized."

Germany's Ministry of Finance reportedly offered to collect the extra mail, the man received, but he refused and said he preferred to keep it to fuel his wood pellet heating, which is a pretty good trade-off for the scare he got from all those tax letters!

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