House panel OKs property reform measure

MANILA, Philippines — The House ways and means panel yesterday approved the third package in the comprehensive tax reform program of the Duterte administration that seeks to reform the country’s real property valuation and assessment system.

The committee, chaired by Albay 2nd district Rep. Joey Salceda swiftly passed the Valuation Reform Bill (VRB) which is expected to raise P30.5 billion in additional revenues for local government units.

Salceda said the measure would likewise enable LGUs to achieve stable financial resources and strengthen the local real property tax base to fund service delivery requirements of the LGUs toward transparent governance and increased public performance.

The VRB aims to improve real property valuation of government by adopting a single market – based schedule market value (SMV) – a table of base unit values for all kinds of real properties within an LGU prepared by assessors – to be used as basis of local and national real property taxation.

Authors, including Salceda, proposed the measure to address the perennial problems in real property valuation attributed to failure of LGUs to update their SMVs that leads to values not reflective of real market.

Salceda stressed that the measure would benefit not just the LGUs, but also the national government  as well in terms of valuation of right-of-way acquisitions.

“This is beneficial to the national government because almost P150 billion in projects are delayed every year because of right-of-way acquisitions,” he told reporters in an interview.

“By addressing the long-standing issues in valuation for right-of-way acquisitions, the national government stands to save millions by preventing cost overruns due to delayed project completion,” the lawmaker stressed.

Salceda said the government would also save P25.2 billion per year due to elimination of costs for notice, conduct of hearing, and publication of zonal values.