Property tax evaluation conundrum

sisalka

I have just been reading the LPT act on the official website.
It states that the value of the property in question is the value if it was sold on 1st May this year. And it has to be a residence, defined as a building or part of a building where someone lives or could live.

Ok, here is my problem. If I take the legal text at face value and adopt their definition, then my house is exempt. My house used to be a residence along the lines of the LPT law. At the moment and until it is finished, my house is a building site, no services (the builder has only started on the demolition part of the refurb and extend), no heat, water or electricity, no ceilings, no walls upstairs. By the beginning of May the garden will also be dug up to lay pipes.

So how do I value the house? It is not a residence according to LPT law on the valuation date 1st May.

So if I ignore what the law says and assuming I just declare it a residence, do I give the price of the house at some other arbitrary date - ignoring what the revenue tells me the date should be??? And if so would I become liable if there ever is a question about the value? I cannot even ask a property professional because there is nothing they could get me a price on, or if they did it would be the value of the building site.

So take the law at face value or put my own spin on it by just wildly guessing a value?

My problem is that is feels a bit like damned if I do, damned if I don't. It feels uneasy to just assume that some guess of mine will be ok when it completely ignores what the law says in the first place - but then taking that at its word feels equally dodgy. Anybody out there who could explain the 'right' way to interpret or even just read this particular brand of legalese?

Ken.

http://www.scsi.ie/MEDIAII

It said owners will have to provide "appropriate documentary evidence" that the house is not fit to live in if they want to avoid the property tax.
will have to show that their empty house does not have basic necessities, which might include a roof, toilets, a water supply or an electricity supply.

If you have an engineer for your building work i'm sure s/he will be able to attest that your house is uninhabitable for the forseeable future. Ring revenue.

sisalka

Thanks, that is actually a good idea, talk to the source - should have thought of that myself! :cool:

dhaslam

Reading the instructions literally the value is the market value at 1st May and that is not changed by any work done to the house after that date. But it isn't clear whether it would be exempt for the next few years if not habitable on the valuation date because there is no detail relating to that qualification for exemption.

There seems to be a basic weakness in the way the tax is set up. It is supposed to be a self assessed tax and if so why should you have to contact tax to ask whether your property is habitable or not? If you have multiple properties you cannot make the returns for the other ones until the non-liable one is deleted and there is no provision to do this and no time limit s on the tax office to reply. They don't seem to be even bothered to man the help line so you have to write and they don't even supply a freepost address. If the return is late there is no provision for avoidance of penalties for delays cause by tax. It was totally unreasonable to delay the assessments until a few days before the return date and to have such disgraceful inaccuracies. It seems that they couldn't be bothered, at least in some areas, to include properties that were returned in manual returns for the previous property taxes. Also they don't show the taxpayers PPS on the assessment form and in some cases it is incorrect.

sisalka

Thanks for the post, dhaslam, I think you are right. The whole thing is just a mess. If I do what I'm supposed to by law, the house is not habitable and therefore not liable. Or I assume that revenue somehow means the house as what I would guess it might be worth sometime next year (when it will be habitable again) - and I'm therefore breaking the law. I can't win, either way it feels like the revenue can come back and penalise. There is no security in the law to protect the citizen. Only revenue is protected. We'l probably find a kind of hybrid way of assessing tax that will not be correct in legal terms but hopefully make sense somehow.

CIARAN_BOYLE

As far as I can tell the house is not habitable and therefore not liable for tax until it it becomes habitable.

Once it becomes habitable then you would have to pay at at what it would be worth in a 01/05/13.

At least thats my understanding.