By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

The government has already added $160m worth of property to the tax roll through its technology-driven initiative to upgrade "antiquated" systems, the deputy prime minister has revealed.

K Peter Turnquest, addressing the eighth annual Caribbean valuation and construction conference, said efforts to reform real property tax were already bearing fruit through the addition of 550 extra properties to the rolls.

Referring to the government's recently-launched initiative to capture every home and commercial building on New Providence, Mr Turnquest said some 16,000 properties - including vacant land - have already been assessed. With this number accounting for 20 percent of the island, he added that the evaluation project was on target for completion within the target 18-month timeframe.

"Since the project started earlier this year, almost 16,000 properties have been assessed, including residential, commercial and vacant lands," the deputy prime minister explained.

"For the tax roll next year, we added 550 new dwellings with an estimated appraised value to the tax roll of $160m. With 20 percent of the island of New Providence assessed already, the project is on target to be completed in its 18-month timeframe."

Mr Turnquest reaffirmed the initiative's goals of generating $21m in extra annual real property tax revenue, and increasing the number of properties on the tax roll by 30 percent, to a conference organised by the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) and the International Property Tax Institute (IPTI).

To achieve this, as announced earlier this year, door-to-door calls are being made on all New Providence properties over the period to end-2020 in a bid to create a modernised tax system that delivers improved revenue yields together with greater taxpayer equity and fairness.

The data collected will ultimately be used to develop an "objective basis" for valuing real estate that will enable owners to challenge billings and tax assessments they believe are over-valued.

While property owners do not have to give data "collectors" access to the interior of their property, they will be taking photographs of all properties and measuring their exterior dimensions. They will also determine the current property owner's identity, and seek information including the year the building was built; occupancy type and size of building; number of rooms and type of construction.

"We are not too proud to admit that our real property tax system is quite antiquated," Mr Turnquest told the conference. "The data collection exercise that we have underway is the foundation for addressing the various known challenges we have...

"At the end of the day, the transformation we are ushering in will allow us to have more fair and timely assessments using quantifiable and objective criteria. We will finally be able to establish boundaries that group homogenous parcels together for the purpose of valuing like properties equitably. In other words, rate parity in neighbourhoods across the country.

"And, importantly, for me as minister of finance, the government will be in a position to reduce revenue leakage caused by dated, incomplete and inaccurate data currently stored in the system."

Mr Turnquest said the reforms that the Department of Inland Revenue (DIR) and its consultant, Tyler Technologies, are undertaking are but one part of the government-wide digitisation and modernisation initiatives designed to transform the public sector bureaucracy.

Acknowledging the "frustrations" with the real property tax system, especially when it came to fairness and the "ease of doing business", the deputy prime minister added that the government wanted to transform it into "a model example" for the Caribbean.

With real property tax forecast to generate $131m, or six percent of the government's total revenue for the 2019-2020 fiscal year, Mr Turnquest said: "It is difficult to arrive at a more accurate and fair valuation system if your data is not fully computerised; if your systems pay little or no consideration to market information; if the values on record are based on decades-old market information.

"In the future we will not have to worry about these legacy issues, as we are doing ownership research and reconciliation, land pricing and sales analysis, among other things. Upon completion of our data collection and data entry, an update of land and building rates will be possible using a fully enabled Computer Assisted Mass Assessment (CAMA) software tool."