The wages of hundreds of thousands of employees will have to be adjusted in February due to the political discussion about company cars. Clarity about the tax that employees must pay will not be available until next week at the earliest.
Anyone who has a diesel or petrol company car will have to pay more taxes on it this year. Minister of Finance Vincent Van Peteghem (CD&V) has a proposal ready to moderate the tax burden, but there is still discussion about this within the federal government. White smoke is not expected until next Friday at the earliest, too late to correctly calculate January wages for hundreds of thousands of employees.
The increased tax has everything to do with the automatic mechanism to calculate the benefit in kind (VAA). Anyone who has a company car and also uses it privately will receive VAA and must pay taxes on it. That amount depends on the list price of the car, its age and the average CO2 emissions of the fleet. This BAT and the associated tax are recalculated every year.
But this year the average CO2 emissions are throwing a spanner in the works. Because there will be many more electric cars on the road in 2023 compared to the previous year, the average will be much lower. Anyone who still drives a polluting fossil company car would therefore have to pay a lot more taxes. This mechanism was intended to stimulate the greening of the vehicle fleet.
The social secretariats now have no choice but to use the 2023 parameters for January wages. “We have to do something,” says Bart Vingerhoets, legal advisor at Securex. “It is difficult for us not to calculate VAA. Some companies will already pay out during this week. As soon as we have new data, we can possibly make adjustments for employers who only pay out in February, but we assume that we will have to base ourselves on the 2023 figures for all January wages. That is annoying for us, and for the hundreds of thousands of employees who have a company car.”
7 of 50 euro extra?
In concrete terms, they will have to pay the tax for that month and that of January on their February payslip. In Van Peteghem’s proposal, the monthly additional tax fluctuates around 7-8 euros. Without adjustment, this could amount to an extra 50 euros per month. To illustrate: for a Golf Variant with a petrol engine and a list price of 33,705 euros, the monthly tax would increase from 124.94 euros to 164.87 euros without adjustment of the automatic mechanism. In Van Peteghem’s proposal, the new tax would only amount to 131.38 euros. A difference of 33 euros per month.
We now have to wait and see what the outcome will be, because it is sensitive for the Greens and Socialists to be less strict on fossil commercial vehicles. “It is a pity that all those employees and companies are in trouble with their pay slips due to political games,” says Michel Martens, director of the knowledge center of the automotive federation Febiac. “However, we had already insisted in December that the calculation should be adjusted. It has been left to muddle through until now.”