Deadline for property declarations moved to end-November

Taxpayers will be given an extra four months to make amendments to the annual declarations of any property they own, known as the E9 form, while the penalty for doing so will be lowered.

Kathimerini understands that the Finance Ministry decided to extend the deadline for making changes to the forms because numerous errors were spotted by inspectors on ones that had already been submitted to tax authorities.

The original deadline for the E9 form, which must include undeveloped land as well as apartments or houses, was July 29 but an amendment submitted to Parliament yesterday by Finance Minister Euclid Tsakalotos and Alternate Finance Minister Tryfon Alexiadis seeks to extend this until November 30. The amendment also seeks to lower the penalty for making adjustments to the form from 100 to 50 euros.

Sources said the Finance Ministry found that many of the first batch of forms that were processed showed that the property owners had to pay substantially higher tax than in previous years. It appears that the anomaly was caused by many taxpayers not registering undeveloped plots of land properly.

The government has decided to exclude such land parcels from property tax charges this year. The decision not to include them in the single property tax, known as ENFIA, was taken due to concerns that many landowners would see a substantial rise in the amount of tax they have to pay. The government only rubber-stamped the exclusion after it was confident it could still raise the 2.6 billion euros it targeted from ENFIA without revenues from plots of land.

Another mistake that inspectors have come across is homeowners not registering the surface area covered by auxiliary, rather than main, buildings properly. The tax rate for the supplementary structures is 90 percent lower than the tax for the main buildings. Other errors include not recording the surface area or the year the building was constructed properly. The latter is complicated by the fact that the year that the building permit was issued is officially recognized as the year of construction.