PROPERTY owners with land holdings valued at between $10 million and $50 million, and more than $200 million will be required to pay increased taxes in the 2003/2004 financial year, the finance minister, Omar Davies, announced in Parliament yesterday.

Davies told the House that the owners of 2,425 parcels of land valued at $10 million to $50 million will, in the new financial year, be required to pay $320,000 per year for property taxes, up from the $170,000 that they paid in the 2002/2003 financial year. Another seven land owners with properties valued at more than $200 million will, in the new financial year, pay $4 million in taxes for the year, up from $3 million.

However, the owners of 154 parcels of land valued between $50 million and $200 million will continue to pay $1.5 million for property tax in the new financial year.

Based on a 100 per cent compliance, the government expects to collect an additional $203.6 million from the increases in property taxes.

Davies told parliamentarians that under the 2002/3 provisional tax liability system, Government projected to yield $913 million at a compliance rate of 65 per cent, while an additional amount of $200 million, representing arrears, was expected to result in an overall intake of $1.1 billion.

“I can now report that during the period April 2002 – February 2003, $724 million was collected; it is estimated that for the last month of the financial year 2002/2003 we will collect another $80 million, making an estimated total of just over $800 million,” the finance minister said.

But he told the House that the level of collection means that the Ministry of Finance, in the fiscal year 2002/2003, will be required to provide approximately $875 million to meet the recurrent cost associated with financing street lights, solid waste management and administrative support for parish councils.

“We are also ensuring that the JPSCo fulfils its obligations pertaining to street lighting through monitoring by the parish councils,” said Davies.

But while Davies noted that Government continued to work steadily to improve the tax collection system, he said existing machinery was “still not adequate to deal efficiently with the introduction of a new rate structure”.

Come 2004-2005 a system of annual revaluations will be introduced, he said.

He also told the House that the system of appeals for relief were still in place providing a mechanism for persons to seek tax breaks in special circumstances, namely statutory relief, agricultural derating and special discretionary.

Property taxes were the source of much discontent last year, when a high revaluation and an attempt to introduce a confusing tiered system of payment, resulted in many taxpayers refusing to comply. The resulting disquiet forced then minister of local government, Arnold Bertram to abandon the system.

Bertram had earlier proposed a street light cess, based on a percentage of electricity bills, to fund the payment of street lighting. He was, however, forced to abandon that plan after coming under pressure from civic society and the parliamentary Opposition.