The Ministry of Finance (MOF) said yesterday that it was set to scrap land value tax exemptions for privately owned idle land, except that offered for public road use, effective from Jan. 1 next year.
The ministry’s move was apparently taken to deal with the worsening problem of land hoarding, which is seen as one of the major reasons behind the nation’s rocketing housing prices. It comes in the wake of the central bank’s recently unveiled credit -tightening measures.
“The cancelation of the preferential tax treatment is mainly aimed at achieving fair taxation rather than increasing tax revenues,” Deputy Minister of Finance Chang Sheng-ford (張盛和) told the Taipei Times by telephone.
“We didn’t calculate how much the nation’s tax revenues will grow [following the new regulation],” Chang said, although he added that scrapping the land value tax exemption could still increase the amount of tax income collected by the government.
The ministry’s announcement came after the Cabinet approved an amendment to Article 9 of the Regulations Governing the Reduction or Exemption of Land Tax (土地稅減免規則) on May 7, stipulating that only vacant lots for “public road use” will be exempted from land value taxes.
“The original regulations failed to restrict the scope of public use of vacant lots so that the preferential tax treatment was abused [by land owners], leading to a low utilization of property,” the ministry said in a statement yesterday.
Many owners of vacant lots turned their land into plazas, green spaces or parks for public use, which would have otherwise been used for other purposes, in order to be eligible for the land value tax exemption, the statement said.
Last week, the ministry issued a notice to local tax authorities, requesting that they begin investigating how many unused vacant lots receive preferential tax treatment in their jurisdictions ahead of the new measure taking effect next year.
This move was considered by many as an alternative way for the government to slap additional levies on unused land to contain rampant land hoarding by property developers amid rocketing housing prices in the Taipei area.
The ministry, however, said that the amendment was based on a resolution reached by the Tax Reform Commission in February last year in an attempt to preclude property speculation, stressing that it differed from the concept of imposing a “vacant lot tax.”
The land value tax is calculated based on the current valuation of land announced by local governments, with the rate ranging from one percent to 0.55 percent, the ministry said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day