DSF: Only 35,120 properties declared for lease

Financial Services Bureau (DSF) director Iong Kong Leong said that only 35,120 units in the territory have been declared to the Bureau as ‘leased units’, admitting not all property owners in the city have fulfilled their tax obligations. In an interview with local Chinese-language newspaper Macao Daily, the government official said the number of registered properties in the Special Administrative Region amounted to 263,712. Nevertheless, only some 13 per cent of the total have been reported to DSF as leased units. The number of registered properties includes residential, commercial, industrial units, offices, as well as parking spaces, according to Mr. Iong, who noted that the obligations of owners of commercial and industrial units are actually higher than the others. The tax rate for leased property has already been decreased from 16 per cent to 10 per cent, while the tax rate for a non-rental unit is only 6 per cent. In addition, when property owners declare to the Bureau their property for leasing, they will need to pay a stamp duty equivalent to 0.5 per cent of their leasing contract value, while their annual property tax will also depend upon the rental they receive. The DSF director also claimed that a new taxation measure has been applied to profits tax Group B taxpayers, enabling them to conduct self-assessment for their own tax payable, in order to decrease tax disputes caused by different evaluations. Group B taxpayers refer to those individuals or corporations without appropriate accounting books and records. Hence, Mr. Iong perceives that it was more frequent for this group of taxpayers to argue about the tax payable assessed by the government before. The government official hopes the new measure can encourage Group B taxpayers to conduct assessments themselves, so that administrative procedures can also be simplified. According to Mr. Iong, Group B taxpayers only account for 5 per cent of the city’s total taxpayers. A recent DSF notice indicated that the number of taxpayers of Profits Tax subject to tax payment fell to 1,911 for the fiscal year 2014 from 44,819 the previous year, following Chief Executive Fernando Chui Sai On’s announcement in the March Policy Address that the ceiling amount of the exemption for profits tax for fiscal year 2014 would be extended from its original MOP320,000 (US$40,000) to MOP600,000.