Changes to property tax act

		Sun, Sep 19, 2010 The Business Times
By Felda Chay PROPERTY owners will no longer need to inform the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS) when they rebuild, enlarge, alter or conduct improvement works on their properties. In one of three changes Parliament passed on the property tax act yesterday, IRAS will now obtain the necessary information - essential to re-assessing property tax - directly from other government agencies that have the information. Two other amendments to the property tax act will see the fine tuning of the definition of 'structural networks', and reduction of the time limit for the recovery of property tax to five years from the current six years. Lim Hwee Hua, Minister in the Prime Minister's Office and Second Minister for Finance and Transport, said that shortening the time limit to recover outstanding property tax 'is in alignment with the five year time-bar period for tax recovery under other Tax Acts', such as the income tax and GST tax acts. The change is set to kick in from January 2012. On fine-tuning the definition of 'structural networks', Mrs Lim said that the definition should be made clearer 'for the avoidance of doubt, that even a single pipeline may be regarded as a structural network. Further, it will be made clear that property tax can be levied on the installed parts of a network that is currently in use or intended to be in use.' For example, a network of pipelines that has been installed but has yet to be put to active use is liable to property tax, she added. Last week, IRAS said that its $2 billion property tax collection for FY 2009-2010 was 31 per cent lower than the FY 2008-2009 collection. This article was first published in The Business Times.