144. Ongoing Business Debts And Current Account Credit

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The German trade tax has no equivalent in the tax laws of most other countries and is therefore often perplexing for foreign businesses operating in Germany. It is a tax imposed on a commercial enterprise as a reified object, as opposed to a tax imposed on a person. Like the real property tax, it is collected from the person to whom the object being taxed is attributed, but is calculated with regard merely to the object of taxation, not the totality of the economic circumstances of the person to whom this object is attributed. The historical origins of the trade tax are found in the diverse forms of taxes on commercial enterprise developed in the middle ages. The modern trade tax dates from the 1890s, when its revenue was assigned exclusively to local government as part of the Prussian tax reform. Since then, the trade tax