Finance Ministry to grant deadline extensions

The Finance Ministry is planning to grant two deadline extensions to assist enterprises hurt by the health and energy crises and which have run up debts during the pandemic, and to help those who submitted their property transfer tax declarations by end-December which have not yet been processed by the tax authorities.

In both cases, officials at the ministry and the Independent Authority for Public Revenue estimate that a one-month extension is sufficient, but they do not rule out the possibility of postponing the deadlines in the next few days by two months.

At this stage the government intends to extend the deadlines for debts created during the pandemic, which may be settled in payment programs with up to 72 monthly tranches, and for those who have submitted their property transfer tax declarations to authorities either physically or online, in order to take advantage of the old property zone rates, known as objective values, which applied up to December 31, 2021.

In the second half of December (and despite the Christmas holidays), when the online platform for parental concessions and donations was activated, some 15,000 parental concessions and 4,700 donations of properties were declared. If one adds the handwritten statements submitted to tax offices, the sum of declarations exceeds 30,000.

Now the Finance Ministry is set to give citizens another month or two for the completion of property contracts, parental concessions and donations, while the associations of notaries (SESSE) and property owners (POMIDA) say the system is unable to serve all transactions in time. Thousands of statements submitted to the competent authorities remain outstanding, and thousands of TAP (property tax) certificates are still pending.

At the same time a huge load of certificates that are necessary for the issue of inheritance acceptance documents have been delayed, leading to respective delays in the drafting of acceptance papers.

Civil engineers also have problems in issuing the necessary Building IDs, as the queue for their issue is extremely long, so they are asking for an extension too for property transfer status as it applied up to December 31, preferably until March 31.