The Tribune

By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

THE Government’s real property tax amnesty has yielded just under $18 million to-date, a Cabinet Minister confirmed yesterday, with 1,000 new properties added to the Government’s database.

Michael Halkitis, minister of state for finance, told Tribune Business that the amnesty, which now runs until August 5, had yielded $17.9 million in revenues to-date.

The initiative, which was launched in late February and set to run initially until June 30, was extended due to the influx of property owners looking to clear their arrears or register their property for the first time.

“Initially we didn’t have a lot of people coming in, but as we changed our public relations perspective and really accelerated the public relations campaign, more people came forward,” Mr Halkitis said.

“What we found for some of the people who had large arrears and wanted to clear them, was that some of them wanted to get financing to do it. Some people had waited until the last week, even the last day, so you had a situation where there were long lines and people couldn’t be processed. So we decided we should extend the programme.”

Mr Halkitis added: “So far my information is we have 1,000 new individuals who have come forward  to register properties, so that is 1,000 new properties that we didn’t previously have on our register.

“What that means is those 1,000 people will pay their taxes beginning this year and going forward.  What’s good about that is that would have been 1,000 people we would normally have had to go and look for. Through this amnesty program they came voluntarily, so that’s a good thing.

“Secondly, we have collected in total just over 2,200 persons who have come forward with arrears to take advantage of the programme, and we have also had people who are current who we gave a rebate to. We will give a rebate of 5 per cent of their bill for the next three years as long as they remain current. In total we have collected approximately $17.9 million from this amnesty programme, so it’s been successful in that people have been coming forward.”

   Mr Halkitis had revealed previously that one-third of the properties that should be subjected to real property tax assessments are not in the Government’s database, with 25 per cent of those that are benefiting from the ‘owner-occupied’ exemption.

He had noted that the Government is only collecting half the real property tax revenues due to it annually, with an estimated  35,000 properties which should have been assessed during the 2011 tax year not covered or registered in the Government’s database.

Of the 88,000 properties in the database, some 22,000 were benefiting from the exemption, while close to 50 per cent of those liable to pay real property tax were not receiving their bills.

  “What we have to do now going forward is to make sure that we do not get back to a point where we have lot of arrears ,and we have this practice where we just send out a bill and wait for people to come,” Mr Halkitis said.

“We have to actively follow-up. You don’t have to pay it all at one time; you can do a payment plan, and so we have to just be more active in the collection, not to hound people or try and over-tax people, but to let them know that we are here to work with them.

“We will be making some adjustment to the office to make us more customer friendly and give us the ability to follow-up. We look forward to modernising the real property tax legislation.”