Dutch companies still owe €9.6 billion euros in taxes deferred during Covid pandemic

About 153,000 companies still owe the Tax Authority 9.6 billion euros in taxes deferred during the coronavirus pandemic, State Secretary Marnix van Rij (Tax Authority) said in a letter to parliament.

Van Rij said that many businesses are paying their Covid debts to the Tax Authority on time, and many have even repaid in full ahead of schedule. But a significant number are struggling. About 8,000 companies have not repaid any of their deferred taxes, the outgoing State Secretary said.

Struggling entrepreneurs can make payment arrangements with the Tax Authority. The payment arrangements of 54,000 companies have been terminated for various reasons, mostly because they didn’t stick to the terms. Their total debt is 3.2 billion euros, and Van Rij expects that a large part of this will prove uncollectable.

The government took many measures to help companies survive the coronavirus pandemic, including allowing them to defer their tax payments to the Tax Authority. Because the tax measures helped both healthy companies and companies that were already heading toward bankruptcy, the government had expected that it wouldn’t be able to recover all of the deferred taxes, Van Rij pointed out.

At the previous measurement at the end of April 2023, Dutch businesses still owed the Tax Authority 16.5 billion euros in coronavirus debts.