As many as 200,000 people who have not yet paid their Local Property Tax (LPT) for 2015 have been warned it is “in their interests” to contact Revenue before officials finish processing payments already made and start pursuing non-payers.
The compliance work will focus on homeowners who have not paid the tax or declared their intention to pay by a final payment deadline towards the end of March.
A spokeswoman for Revenue said the compliance rate for 2015 was “well over 80 per cent” but she said officials from the tax authority were still working through more than 60,000 pieces of correspondence. Revenue will not publish exact figures or detailed compliance statistics until early next month.
The deadline for those who have not yet paid their 2015 LPT or signed up to pay via monthly direct debits or by employee deductions expired almost two weeks ago. Revenue has urged those yet to pay to do so before the collection process comes to an end in the coming weeks.
Revenue penalises property owners who have not paid the tax or declared their intention to pay by charging interest at a rate of 0.0219 per cent per day (or 8 per cent a year) from the beginning of January. Unpaid tax and interest will be a charge on a property and will cause difficulties for any transfer of ownership on sale or inheritance it has warned.
More than one million people paid the local property tax last year in one lump sum – by a single debit authority, debit card, credit card, cash, cheque or postal order or through regular cash payments.
A further 625,000 homeowners who paid last year’s tax by direct debit or through deductions from their wages did not have to do anything as their payments will be processed as normal from the end of this month.
The amount people will have to pay in LPT depends on the value declared for the property on May 1st, 2013, and the tax rate applying to a property for 2015. The LPT rates have changed for those living in one of the 14 local authorities that announced reductions in their LPT rates last year. Those savings range from 1.5 per cent to 15 per cent and the Revenue has said it will make the changes automatically.
