Why there is a barcode on your Swiss tax statement

If you bank in Switzerland, once a year you receive a tax statement (Steuerauszug, relevé fiscal, estratto fiscale). At the bottom sits a grey stripe made of tiny rectangles. That stripe is the whole statement again, encoded so the cantonal tax office can read it by machine.

The format

The stripe is a PDF417 barcode carrying an XML document in the eCH-0196 format, the Swiss standard for electronic tax statements. It lists every security you held on 31 December with its tax value, every dividend and interest payment during the year, and the Swiss withholding tax and foreign source taxes that were deducted.

Why it matters to you

Your tax software (each canton has its own) scans the barcode and fills in the securities and assets register for you: assets, income, and the refund claim for withholding tax. No typing, no transposed digits.

Swiss banks produce this statement automatically. Foreign brokers such as Interactive Brokers, DEGIRO or Trade Republic do not, which leaves their customers filling the register by hand from a stack of PDFs. TaxClar builds the eCH-0196 statement from those PDFs, one broker and one tax year at a time. The home page walks through how that works.