Government has sought legal advice to examine whether squatters on private lands and those with buildings on state lands will have to pay the tax, Finance Minister Colm Imbert said yesterday. He said the Attorney General has asked the Solicitor General to examine the matter.
“If someone is squatting on state lands with a building they built, the issue that needs to get legal clarity is if they own the land,” Imbert added.
Speaking to reporters at Government’s weekly press briefing, AG Faris Al-Rawi said it was a very complicated issue, since one had to be very careful that land is not given away unwittingly.
Imbert and Al-Rawi both gave various perspectives on how the situation was being viewed yesterday.
Imbert contended that if a squatter has a building on land they don’t own, they’ll have to pay property tax on the building - not the land. Al-Rawi claimed squatters with certificates of comfort for a property may also have to pay property tax.
Imbert said, “If you don’t own the land and have a building on the land, then property tax is due on the building. If you’ve rented or leased someone else’s land, then you own any building you put on it and will be required to pay tax on that (building).”
He added, “Where the confusion is coming up is whether the land you’re on isn’t your land and whether you have to pay tax on the land.”
Imbert said the Property tax Act stated that property owned by the state is exempted from tax.
“So the question is who is the owner of the land? Once you’ve occupied it, you may have a certificate of comfort, meaning you’re along the way to getting ownership. That’s the point the Prime Minister recently made when he said the aspect concerning squatters is very interesting. He never said squatters have to pay the property tax,” Imbert said.
“The issue is, if as a squatter you claim you own the land by possession if it - and it is that owners have to pay the property tax - but when time comes for you to pay, you say you’re not the owner of the land.”
Imbert said he had to quote former Prime Minister Basdeo Panday, who’d once said a person couldn’t be “half pregnant,
Imbert said, “It’s either you’re pregnant or not. So it’s either you’re the owner of the land or not. That’s the question to resolve.
“It’s a very interesting situation the Attorney General’s office has to distil, digest and drill down into to answer that question - if you’re the owner of the land or not.”
One had to examine matters including how long a person was on the land, nature of their claim, and rights, he added.
Complicated task
Al-Rawi said many people apply for a certificate of comfort where the state acknowledges they have squatters’ rights and they move from the certificate-status eventually into a lease granted by the state. In that situation, Al-Rawi said squatters would say they are owners of the property.
“And in those circumstances, the advice given to us is that they’ll be entitled to pay taxes because you can’t claim you’re the owner and be recognised by the state as that and not pay your taxes as land/property owners.”
Al-Rawi explained a person can apply to the courts to acquire state land if they have been in uninterrupted possession of it for 30 years. They can also apply to courts to acquire private land if they’ve had uninterrupted possession for 16 years. People who haven’t had possession for that length of time will have to separately claim for any building they’ve erected on the land.
Al-Rawi said Parliament will be examining legislation for compulsory registration of land to verify titles for all lands. This starts in Tobago with an IDB funded project.
Imbert also said the projected $500 million in property tax revenue couldn’t fund Local Government services since the Local Government sector operated on $2 billion. He said churches and schools were exempted from the tax, but Government had no plans to tinker with the law to include “wealthy churches,” since it simply wanted to implement the law at this point.
