The key to tightening the loopholes in the actual-price registration system for property transactions is to impose the obligation to register selling prices on the buyers, rather than on land administration agents, the Association of Real-Estate Attorneys said yesterday.
The association made the remarks at a press conference at the legislature yesterday morning, hours after Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺) announced the Executive Yuan’s decision to order the legislature to correct an amendment to the Land Administration Agent Act (地政士法) that it passed on Jan. 3.
The amendment is designed to allow land registration agents who fail to declare property transaction information within 30 days of the registration of ownership transfer as required by Article 26-1 of the act, or who provide inaccurate information, a chance to provide the accurate information within a certain period of time.
Photo: CNA
Those who fail to do so within the specified period would be fined between NT$30,000 and NT$150,000.
Prior to the amendment, violators of the article were to be penalized immediately.
Urging the Executive Yuan to carefully weigh its decision, association director-general Su Jung-chi (蘇榮淇) said the legislature only agreed to his request that an amendment be drafted to address the problems of the registration system after much deliberation.
Su added that he had tried to bring the matter to the attention of the Ministry of the Interior since the registration system was launched on Aug. 1, 2012, but received no response.
“How come land registration agents have to face punishments if they fail to declare accurate transactions information within the given time, but the buyers don’t? It should be the obligation of the buyers, not the land administration agents, to register such information,” Su said.
The Chinese Association of Real-Estate Brokers (CAREB) made a similar suggestion yesterday.
“The real-price registration system has helped raised the price transparency of the housing market and is expected to do more good than harm. However, the buyers should be the ones bearing the obligation to declare transactions information,” the association said.
The association said land administration agents and real-estate brokers should only help the buyers file the information at their request, with fines being imposed on the former should they declare incorrect information deliberately and on the latter if they are found falsifying the information.
“That would be the best solution to the registration system’s problems… The government will cripple the system eventually if it only partially amends the act without putting the problems in a broader context,” the association said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater