Amid the government’s pledge to curb real-estate speculation, amendments to the House Tax Act (房屋稅條例) cleared the legislature yesterday to raise taxes on non-self-used residential houses, while the Financial Holding Company Act (金融控股公司法) was revised to strengthen the protection of personal information.
The amended House Tax Act raises taxes on properties used as residences, but not by the owner, from its lower limit of 1.2 percent of its value to 1.5 percent, and from its upper limit of 2 percent to 3.6 percent.
It also raises taxes on properties used for business purposes or as private hospitals or clinics, a professional office or the premises of a non-profit civic organization.
The amended Financial Holding Company Act stipulates the application of the Personal Information Protection Act (個人資料保護法).
“Except for the name and address of customers, the subsidiaries of the financial holding company shall abide by the Personal Information Protection Act with regard to collecting, handling and using the customer’s personal data, transaction records and other relevant information with other subsidiaries, and shall not gather or use the customer data for purposes other than the designated use,” according to the revised version of the law.
The legislators proposing the amendment said that the change was made in accordance with the principle of having customers “opt in,” rather than one that requires them to “opt out.”
Other amendments that passed their third reading yesterday include those to the Act for Worker Protection of Mass Redundancy (大量解僱勞工保護法) and to the Collective Agreement Act (團體協約法).
The former tightened the act to protect workers who have been subject to layoffs by a business entity having more than 500 workers and laying off one-fifth of its employees in 60 days or 80 workers in one day (with the existing regulation only covering the former). The act now also applies to those businesses, regardless of the number of employers, that have laid off 200 workers in 60 days or 100 workers in a day.
The amended Collective Agreement Act says that if any party negotiating a collective agreement fails to respond within 60 days and its silence is recognized as a refusal to negotiate, the matter can be directly handed to a competent authority for mediation or arbitration, if no other relevant agreements between the two parties are already present.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift