NLA’s scrutiny committee mulls postponing new land tax bill until year 2020

Enforcement of the new Land and Building Tax law is likely to be postponed to 2020 instead of next year as earlier scheduled.

Lt-Gen Charnchai Phuthong, spokesman of the scrutiny committee of the National Legislative Assembly, said on Monday that the panel would seek the government’s opinion about its proposal to amend the Land and Building Tax bill to make it enforceable in 2020 instead of 2019.

็็He added that the scrutiny panel would ask for the postponement of its scrutiny of the bill for 60 days, which would be the seventh postponement of the bill although it had scheduled a meeting this Wednesday to deliberate the observations made by 20 agencies concerned about the bill.

However, Mr Suvich Rojanavanich, spokesman of the Fiscal Policy Office, said that the Finance Ministry had wanted the Land and Building Tax bill to be passed by the NLA and to become law for national interest, but he could not say for sure when the bill will be passed and whether it will come into force next year or not because many big landlords have opposed the bill.

Under the new law, the income-based method previously used in tax calculation will be replaced by an assessment based on a property’s appraised value to improve the clarity of future tax calculations.  Agricultural land with a house or a residential land with a house which is less than 50 million baht will be exempted from taxation.

Besides the Land and Building Tax bill, the NLA is expected to postpone the deliberations of three other bills namely the Water Resources bill, the Conflict of Interests between Private and Public Interests bill and the bill on the development of regulation and management of state enterprises.