On Tuesday, the Sejm passed changes to the laws on agricultural tax, local taxes and fees, and stamp duty. The changes are to enter into force on January 1, 2025. As Deputy Minister of Finance Jarosław Neneman said during the parliamentary proceedings, the existing regulations were unclear and did not match reality.
On Tuesday, the Sejm passed amendments to the Act on: agricultural tax, local taxes and fees and stamp duty. According to the Ministry of Finance, the amendment is intended to eliminate interpretation doubts. 231 MPs voted for the act, 43 were against and 147 abstained. The act will now go to the Senate.
The amendment is to enter into force on January 1, 2025.
The deputy head of the Ministry of Finance, Jarosław Neneman, said during the parliamentary work on the project that it was a small amendment, a “first step”. – Taxation of residential buildings, especially in large cities, requires fundamental changes. (…) This will be a big change, we have to wait for this change for a while, we will have to find a political consensus – said the deputy minister.
Scope of changes in taxes
The Act provides for the introduction of new definitions of the terms: “structure” and “building” – for the purposes of real estate taxation. According to the justification, it specifies the rules for imposing real estate tax on garages in residential buildings, clarifies the scope of real estate tax exemption for port infrastructure structures, changes the scope of real estate tax exemption for railway infrastructure facilities, changes the rules for using subjective exemptions in agricultural tax, and also includes a change adapting to the currently applicable EU regulations on the principles of applying reliefs for investments in agricultural farms, the conditions of which must be met by Polish regulations on the application of investment relief in agricultural tax.
As Deputy Minister of Finance Jarosław Neneman said during the parliamentary proceedings, the existing regulations were unclear and did not match reality. Therefore, the amendment is intended to clarify the applicable provisions and eliminate interpretation doubts.
“The rate will be leveled down”
The purpose of the regulations is to clarify the applicable provisions and eliminate interpretation doubts. As Deputy Minister of Finance Jarosław Neneman said when presenting the project, the existing regulations were unclear and did not match reality. He added that a significant number of cases in the Supreme Administrative Court concerned this very thing real estate tax.
Neneman explained that the ministry has decided to “maintain the legal status quo” on tax rules, meaning that something that has been taxed until now will continue to be taxed, and what has not been taxed will not be, except in silos. The deputy minister assured that the money from local taxes will go to local governments for local needs, i.e. for the inhabitants of a given commune.
As he said, the proposed act changes the method of taxation. For example, in the case of garages, the same garage, depending on its legal status, could have different taxes, which should not be the case.
– The rate will be adjusted downwards. We estimate that on a national scale this will be a loss of approximately PLN 170 million, announced the deputy minister. He added that, according to the ministry's estimates, in other cases the financial consequences of the changes will be “zero”.
He added that to ensure a smooth entry into the system, the Ministry of Finance proposes to extend the deadline for submitting property tax declarations for 2025 by entrepreneurs until March 31, so that they have time to adapt to the changes.
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