“The six-and-a-half-year programme of projects, which cost around 21 million euros, 80 percent of which was funded by EU funds, included linking together extensive existing data and converting it into digital form. The web portal “eProstor” (“eSpace”) provides access to a range of data and services and allows users to follow certain administrative procedures,” said Tomaž Petek, Director-General of the Surveying and Mapping Authority of the Republic of Slovenia. Are we now one step closer to a property tax?
The Surveying and Mapping Authority of the Republic of Slovenia has completed the European-funded project programme eProstor, which, among other things, digitised and linked real estate records and enabled electronic commerce in the field of spatial planning and real estate management, Slovenian Press Agency reported on Tuesday. The Surveying and Mapping Authority has set up a new information system, which has merged all six existing databases, including the land cadastre, the building cadastre, the register of spatial units and the register of addresses, and installed them in the distribution environment of the national computer cloud.
Georgi Bangiev, Director-General of the Directorate for Spatial Planning, Construction and Housing at the Ministry of the Environment and Spatial Planning, said that once the programme is completed, the results of the programme need to be upgraded “to give them their validity,” including the intention to establish a horizontal link with the water, nature and environment sectors so that they will be able to carry out spatial analyses. At the closing conference, Minister Uroš Brežan said that the Ministry is aware that all the strategic themes of the Ministry are interlinked through location. “Easily accessible, high-quality, digital and geolocated data on location, space, real estate, water, environment and nature play a leading role in Slovenia’s digital society. To ensure efficient spatial management and quality land administration, we have accelerated and improved processes in spatial planning, building construction and real estate management,” Brežan said, according to the Ministry’s announcement.
Are we now one step closer to property tax with the overhaul of the IT system?
The Ministry of Finance explained that some progress has already been made when it comes to the introduction of the property tax but that they do not have the solutions in place yet. Changes to property taxation are expected to be ready next year as part of the announced tax reform – scheduled to come into force in 2024. The Ministry also says it is too early to talk about the timing of the introduction of the new system, not least because any proposed solutions must first be agreed with both the professional and the general public. “In order to ensure adequate legal certainty for property owners when using the generalised value of their property as the tax base and to fully regulate the new system of property taxation, parallel activities are being carried out in relation to both the system of mass valuation of real estate and the real estate tax itself,” they added.
Golob announced plans to tax all assets, not just real estate
During the former government of Marjan Šarec, the Ministry of Finance published the expert basis for a new property tax, which was supposed to come into force in 2020. Later, the Constitutional Court stopped the process of adopting the law, mainly due to the issue of mass valuation of real estate. The new property tax would replace three existing levies, namely, the building land use tax, the property tax and the forest road maintenance fee. It was announced at the time that the tax would be based on the value of the property, which would be calculated by the Surveying and Mapping Authority in the context of the mass valuation of immovable property – which will now be much easier with the overhaul of the information system. In any case, we can expect significantly higher rates of taxation than those currently in force. Prime Minister Robert Golob has announced that they intend to tax all property, not just real estate.
What the tax rate will be is still a matter of speculation – according to Finance, the rumours range from 0.1 percent to even 1 percent of the estimated market value of the property. The Left party (Levica) proposed some time ago that progressive taxation be introduced for housing, which would mean that the tax could reach up to 1.5 percent. Finance writes that the announcement that all property will be taxed raises even more questions, adding: “The higher the taxes, the more bypasses there will be and the less the state will collect. Anyone who has a lot of capital, investments, will think carefully about whether it would be more worth it for them to invest abroad.”
Sara Kovač
