KINGSTON, Jamaica – It was already a tediously slow process even before the COVID-19 pandemic hit Jamaica.

Now, potential investors, realtors, lawyers and regular buyers and sellers of property, or the person merely hoping to inherit property left by a loved one who has passed, are up in arms with the Government’s Stamp Office where even an expected two-week process to get documents certified is taking up to five months or longer, Observer Online has been told.

“They were always slow and that in and of itself is a shame since the Stamp Office is such an important revenue source for the government,” said one prominent real estate attorney who wished to remain anonymous.

“Now COVID-19 has added to that,” he stated.

Another attorney said that in a recent instance, documents were held up at the Stamp Office because the person who was dealing with those documents contracted the coronavirus.

“Nobody else wanted to handle those documents so we just had to wait,” the attorney lamented.

And a Stamp Office employee confirmed to Observer Online that a pregnant employee recently died from COVID-19, demoralising staff and adding pressure to an already burdened office.

Efforts to a get a comment from the Commissioner General of Tax Administration Jamaica, Ainsley Powell were unsuccessful as he was said to be out of office until September.

Another real estate attorney who spoke with Observer Online explained the frustrations now faced by many lawyers when dealing with the Stamp Office.

“Any conveyance transaction, any sale of land, the very first thing you have to do is to stamp a document, an agreement for sale. It’s the very first step of the transaction so the government gets its money first,” the attorney said.

“Unfortunately, once we lodge these documents at the Stamp Office they’re taking several weeks to come back. Normally before COVID, it was frustrating but it has since gotten worse,” he added.

What’s worse, there is another challenge for lawyers, which has the potential to further slow down the process significantly.

An attorney with whom we spoke explained that while an agreement for sale is for a particular price, if the government believes the price of the property is undervalued hence cutting into its two per cent which it earns for transfer tax, the state will have its department assess the true value of the property.

“If it goes to assessment, you’re talking months before you get back the document,” said the attorney. He admitted that some vendors and purchasers may deliberately under value a property to cut a deal under the table thus forcing the authorities to send it for assessment.

Where a typical transaction takes 90 days, if it goes to assessment you can even go beyond the 90 days before you get back your agreement for sales stamp. And then there is what some attorneys view as a duplication in the process. This is where an agreement for sale of a property is lodged with the Stamp Commissioner and it is assessed.

“You are then told if the value of the property is accepted or not accepted. After the property is assessed you go back for the stamp.

“So you lodge the document twice basically. You lodge it for assessment then you lodge it for stamping and that process on both occasions is just taking longer than normal,” lamented the attorney.

Where an assessment is triggered, documents could languish at the Stamp Office for up to six months unless you have a proactive attorney, Observer Online was told.

“If you allow them to do their own assessment and let it slip without hounding them then yes, I think it can very well take up to six months,” our source stated.

According to him, “The common excuse now is always COVID and that’s something that you can’t really challenge. There are COVID protocols so you can’t even go into the office so you have a long line outside. Just like the tax office (with the long lines) the Stamp Office is the same thing although probably not as bad”. 

And, with some persons working from home it further slows down the process because everything at the Stamp Office is paper-based.

“You have to physically carry down an agreement for sale and they physically assess it and hand it back to us and you physically bring it back for stamping”.

Attorneys are further frustrated as they point out that the buck is always being passed from one employee to the other.

“We are often told that ‘is him dealing with it and him not here so you have to wait until him come back to work,” said one of our sources who explained that unlike the Stamp Office, he can lodge a document for stamping at the tax office and get it back in a day or two.

“They can do it if they want but it’s either that they are under-staffed, overwhelmed or inefficient or just don’t care. Whichever it is I just don’t know.

“If they can do it in two days at the tax office there’s no reason we can’t automate the system enough to be able to get documents out more quickly,” he argued.

Meanwhile, immediate past president of the Realtors Association of Jamaica, Andrew James, concurred that what should be a 90-day undertaking sometimes takes up to five months.

“This is not good business for the government as there is a backlog. You have the realtor waiting, you have the lawyer waiting and you have the buyer waiting. So everybody’s frustrated because it’s taking such a long time,” James said.

“What you find is that sometimes investors come here but the bureaucracy and the red tape is just not encouraging for them to do business here. They may go to other countries where there’s a faster turnaround time,” James noted.

According to James, clients sometimes take out their frustration on the realtor because they may call the lawyer and the lawyer may not take the call or they may be put on to a secretary. So it’s often the real estate agent who is left facing it,” he said.