Was on the 30% ruling before I left the Netherlands in Aug 2014. Just looked at my tax file for 2014, and there was an amount of euro 1k+ listed as “Terug te krijgen.” Does it mean that I will receive money from the tax office automatically?
I never filed tax refund. As I understood, taxes were deducted from my monthly income. The HR office refused to help.
Tax rates are progressive, the higher your income over the whole year, the higher the tax percentage. The amounts that were deducted from your monthly income are always based on the assumption that you would receive that income for the entire year.
If you only worked for 8 months, your total yearly income will be lower than assumed, and less of it will be in the highest percentage range.
So it is normal that if you only work part of the year, you will get part of your deducted tax returned. But you need to file.
It's a few years that filing a tax return has not involved filling a lot of forms in the Netherlands, at least in the most common situations. Your employer does indeed withhold income tax from your salary and provide a lot of information to the tax office (banks do too, incidentally). The tax office then uses that information to pre-fill your tax return and, unless you have some other income or special deductions, you merely have to confirm it is correct to officially file a tax return.
If you have an account on the mijn.belastingdienst.nl website, you can do it there. Before that, there was an app, which is still available. If you used either of those, you might in fact already have filed a tax return.
Beyond that, it does sound like you might get a refund – which is not unusual given the way the system works, especially if you stopped working during the year – but I never actually got any money without formally filing a tax return, even if that's as simple as clicking through the app and “signing” it with my DigiD.
What did happen to me once is that I got a letter along the lines of “You should be eligible for a tax refund for the year XXXX, please submit a tax return to get it", which did work perfectly. In any case, in the Netherlands, you have several years to do that so nothing is lost at this point.
