I'll keep this in English but I'm a Swiss citizen. Can somebody tell me how the SERAFE fee is legal and how they're allowed to give me that invoice despite me never having owned a TV and/ or radio in the past decade?

Absolutely outrageous that they're being funded by people like me who don't even watch TV.

Also this article just got posted: https://www.20min.ch/story/serafe-gewinn-millionen-fliessen-an-privaten-unternehmer-103351975

by MX010

20 comments

  1. It’s simple. You have a smartphone or computer that is capable of receiving TV or radio streams, so you get the invoice.

  2. It’s legal because there’s a law allowing it. (It’s not so difficult, it’s the very definition of “legal”…)

  3. Can you explain why I have to pay for firefighters with my local taxes even though my house has never burnt?

    It’s a public service. That’s why. You may not use it, others do. You may not drive, but part of your taxes pay for our roads. You may never use the train, yet public transport is also funded through taxes…

  5. as long as you have a “device capable of watching or hearing” anything that is funden by serafe you have to pay (inclusive your phone, PC, Laptop). It is possible to avoid the bill but you have to proof that you dont own any device, also they will controll your home regulary, to make sure you dont own a device.

  6. A private company making a huge profit off of a tax is gross.

  7. You are using a pc or phone to post on reddit, therefore you are subject to the serafe fee.
    It’s a tax. Pay it and get over it. It used to be even 50% higher than it is.

  9. We subsidize things that we don’t use, not only the ones we use, that’s how every country functions. I heavily subsidize the infrastructure for car owners even though I don’t own a car, but in return I get subsidized in other areas.

  10. I haven’t watched Swiss TV for more than 20 years

    But hey, I have legs, I probably walk to the nearest bar everyday and watch Swiss TV there, so I pay full price, we never know!!!

    Utterly disgusting from them to make benefits on top of that.

    I hate SERAFE

  11. It’s legal due to the law. It’s not only about people who watch tv but to make media independent, not to get into a situation like Hungary has. The company collecting the fees is terribly incompetent though and I also agree they collect more money than justified for independent media.as i understood the idea was to separate this “tax” to a 3rd entity that cannot be controlled by the actual government

  12. We had the chance to get rid of it, but we chose to keep it. Democracy, fam.

  13. Wait i thought the tv radio fee was for free and fair media. Why are they even making a profit. Shouldn’t it be non- profit??!

  14. Serafe is plain dumb. I have a friend of mine who works for the TV as electrician and he told me that they literally do nothing all day. He’s just there playing videogames all day. He gifted me a couple of mac minis because every couple of year they literally throw everything to the trash and buy it again brand new. It’s ridiculous to be forced to pay for this useless shit. I know I will get downvoted because most swiss are dumb and happy to open their wallets but eh if you think serafe is fair (as most people here in the comments) you are delusional.

  15. What is lame about serafe is that it is by household, so single people living in studios are paying the same as FAMILIES living in huge houses with way bigger and combined salaries. It is not proportional to salary or amount of households. That is what makes it bullshit. Ppl on the lowest incomes of the swiss society paying the same as the 1%? Bullshit

  16. At the end of the day, there are taxes, and nobody likes paying them. And taxes go to fund things, most of which most people will never see apparent in front of them in their day-to-day lives.

    For broadcasting (and also something like a publicly-funded broadcaster, which most countries have), you can’t fund consumption directly because of the nature of broadcasting. The UK attempts a sort-of-consumption tax by a [licensing fee on the television controller directly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_United_Kingdom) (part of the British-ish joke, “Oy! D’you got a loicence foh that there ___?!”) (which there have many ways to subvert, because again, it’s broadcasting); the U.S. has a general tax with a rather opaque and generic allocation system that few people ever actually care about or audit (so at some point in a person’s life, they discover that their tax [money is thrown away on public broadcasting](https://comb.io/MSJHGC), they get very mad, then in the effort it takes to research how much of their taxes are spent on it they forget about it and decide to get mad about something else).

    The serafe is pretty much a universal tax on something that for now could never be practically taxed on consumption, but historically most countries have tried to pretend to do so. It looks unfair in that sense, but at least it appears plainly on the balance sheet — the alternative in many countries is to have such taxes, and their arguably problematic issues, practically concealed from public view.

  17. SERAFE (BillAG and co) is just absolute idiocy.
    Public TV is important and needs to be funded, but instead of this crap that does nothing but generate paperwork and frustration, public broadcast should be funded directly from within the tax filing, just like 3000 other services we don’t get a specific invoice for.

  18. I will never question the tax but I will question the content quality created with that money.

    We are talking about 300 mil francs a year give or take + the shit load of money from Ads and other services.

    The pseudo content no one gives a shit about,in general, could be perceived as a waste and doesn’t make the general public smarter or better informed since they made the SERAFE mandatory.

    So those who protect this tax should question the necessity of just generating trash content over free internet sources and not bash those who think 300 francs is too much for a service that they never use.

  19. The swiss law requires every household to pay the radio- und fernsehabgabe. The uvek made an invitation of tenders and serafe won over billag. Having at least one official tv and/or radio channel in every national language thats not owned by private investors is part of the service public. It garantees a neutral coverage on news and politics.

    We are a small country with 4 national languages. Thats why its rather expensive. But the alternative would be to only have media owned by big coorperations with a lot of ads and a bias towards big money in their news and other program.

    Even if the result was just shy over 50%, the swiss population confirmed the radio- und fernsehabgabe in 2019. And i think thats a good thing. I don’t watch srf very often, but i actually like the stuff like club or stammtisch where representives from different parties are invited to discuss political topics.

  20. Not a fan of public services? Just head a bit farther east. Rumor has it there’s a magical land where all your sovereign citizen fantasies can finally come true.

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