Description

The curriculum, developed and presented by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, focused on property valuation as well as fiscal, legal, political, social and administrative issues. It included discussion of real property markets, system development and management, market value and mass valuation methods, enforcement of the property tax, and taxpayer education and services. The program enriched with interactive sessions within the faculty and participants, as well as various participant activities (e.g. by using in-class polling mechanisms).
A theme running through this year’s course was Value Capture and the Property Tax. This expressed the rationale for a value based tax (beginning with the very first modules) and opened the way for new discussion on value capture concepts and mechanisms.

Topics Covered

The following topics were covered during the workshop:

• Property taxation: benefits, problems, and experience
• Features of ad valorem property tax systems and policy lessons – international comparisons
• Property tax billing, collection, and enforcement
• Political and social issues related to property taxation
• Designing tax rates and property tax relief programs
• Practical demonstration of the property tax revenue model
• Market analysis and valuation methods
• Strategies for taxing farmland
• Perspectives on value capture
• Transfer taxes and municipal user fees & charges
• Objection and appeal procedures
• Developing an action plan for successful property tax reform
• Country case studies (Poland, Estonia, Northern Ireland, South Africa)

Target audience

This course was designed for policymakers and senior level officials responsible for developing and implementing market value-based taxation of real property. Depending on current needs and reforms, these individuals may work with legislative bodies, local governments, or ministries developing policies and laws, or with central and local tax administrations responsible for valuation, tax implementation, and provision of services. This course gathered officials responsible for real property taxes, information systems, such as land cadasters, valuation of real property for tax purposes, government finance, economic development, or land policy, and scholars of public finance and taxation.

Contribution from participants

Participants were requested to prepare and bring along their Country Question, written in English (an existing issue in their country about taxes on land and buildings that they would like to address during the course). The presentation of this assignment had to involve a description of the tax system, with the focus on the question. We provided further guidelines to the accepted participants.

The course included discussion questions and case problems for participants. Participants had to comment on the situation in their countries and identify challenges and problems. The Faculty and other participants provided feedback and offered guidance and additional information.

Faculty

Mr. Riël Franzsen occupies the South African Research chair in Tax Policy and Governance, and is also director of the African Tax Institute in the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. In 1990, he obtained a doctorate in tax law from the University of Stellenbosch (South Africa) and in 2013 also obtained a master’s degree in creative writing from the University of Pretoria. Riël specializes in land and property taxation and regularly acts as a policy advisor for the International Monetary Fund, United Nations, and World Bank. He has worked in this capacity in Africa (Egypt, Kenya, Liberia, Namibia, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda), Asia (Thailand), the Caribbean (Antigua, Dominica, Grenada, Saint Kitts & Nevis, Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent & The Grenadines) and Europe (Croatia, Georgia and Romania). Riël has acted as an instructor for the IMF (Austria, Singapore and Saint Lucia), Lincoln Institute of Land Policy (China and Slovenia), Network of Associations of Local Authorities of South-East Europe (Macedonia) and The Hague Academy for Local Governance (Lesotho). He is on the Board of Advisors of the International Property Tax Institute, regularly participates in local and international conferences, and has authored many journal papers and book chapters on land and property taxation.

Mr. William J. McCluskey joined the University of Ulster in 1986 as a lecturer in real estate. He was appointed a visiting professor of real estate at the University of Lodz, Poland in 1996 and served as professor of property studies at Lincoln University, Christchurch, New Zealand from 2001 to 2002. He is currently professor at the African Tax Institute, University of Pretoria, South Africa. Prior to joining the University of Ulster he worked with the Valuation Office in London and then the Valuation Office in Northern Ireland, where his main responsibilities involved the valuation of all types of property for property tax purposes. His main professional and academic interests are in the fields of real estate valuation and, more specifically, landed property tax.

Mr. Michal Radvan is vice-dean for foreign and external affairs at the Faculty of Law, Masaryk University, Czech Republic, and associate professor of financial law at the department of financial law and economics. He specializes in tax law, and his research is focused mainly on property taxes and local taxes. He is the author of five books and the co-author of almost 40 books. He presented his scientific research in approximately 70 reviewed articles in prestigious journals and conference proceedings. He is a member of the European Association of Tax Law Professors and the Information and Organization Centre for the Research on the Public Finances and Tax Law in the Countries of Central and Eastern Europe. He is a member of the Commission for Financial Law at the Legislative Council of the Czech Government.  

Mr. Wladyslaw Jan Brzeski is currently director of research at the International Property Tax Institute. He is responsible, inter alia, for international data base on property tax systems covering over 40 countries. Brzeski has been involved in property tax reforms in Poland since the beginning of the Post-Soviet transition. He is involved in local government, having acted as a deputy mayor of Krakow, Poland. Brzeski has worked in numerous transition countries, mostly in the capacity of a senior urban specialist at the World Bank. He has collaborated with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy since the early 1990s.

Mr. Tambet Tiits, FRICS, M.Sc., is director general of the Estonian National Land Board. He has been a leader in land taxation and valuation in Estonia since the beginning of the1990s. He was manager of the State Land Survey at the time of Estonia’s independence and was the department director in the new National Land Board responsible for land tax valuation. Following implementation of the land tax in 1993, he formed his own real estate advisory and consulting service. He served as director of the DTZ Baltic from 1994–2015. He has served as chairman of the Estonian Association of Appraisers from 1995-2014 and was elected to the board of the European Group of Valuers Association (TEGoVa) from 2003-2006. He has made presentations on the Estonian land tax at a number of international conferences and has co-authored a chapter on land tax in Estonia in The Development of Property Taxation in Economies in Transition: Case Studies in Economies in Transition by Jane Malme and Joan Youngman (2001).

Dr. Lawrence Walters is emeritus professor of public management at the Romney Institute of Public Management, Brigham Young University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Larry has also been a visiting faculty member at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, and Xiamen University, China. His teaching and research have focused on public finance and budgeting, with a particular focus on land-related taxes and charges. Larry has published four books and 70 articles and research reports. He has served as a consultant to over a dozen countries and several international organizations, in addition to both state and local governments within the United States. His most recent work has focused on developing training materials for government officials in developing countries on land-based financial instruments. 

Lincoln Institute of Land Policy

Semida Munteanu is senior program manager in the Department of Valuation and Taxation at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, where she manages programming and research on international land-related taxes. In 2003, she received her B.A. from Wellesley College, where she studied economics and public finance. Semida is a native of Bucharest, Romania.

Sally Powers has been a visiting fellow in the Department of Valuation and Taxation at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy since 2009. She was director of assessment for the City of Cambridge for 13 years until 2001, when she became an international consultant. That work has taken her to Kosovo, Montenegro, South Africa, the Kyrgyz Republic, and Turkmenistan, among other countries, where she has participated in projects on property taxation, market value revaluations, and establishment of a valuation profession for a transition economy. Sally’s career as an assessment administrator and consultant has involved all aspects of property taxation: legal framework, property appraisal, value defense, local government finance, tax policy, project planning and execution, public information, software specification and testing, cadastral/GIS (geographic information systems) mapping and analysis platforms, and tax collection and enforcement. Her research interests focus on mass appraisal, specifically the application of econometric techniques to analyze market activity and develop models to estimate the market value of properties that have not sold. She has written on topics as diverse as appraisal modeling, implementation of the local property tax in Kosovo, and property tax collection strategies. Sally received her bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of Chicago, and she holds an M.S. from the Boston College Carroll School of Management.

Joan Youngman is a senior fellow and chair of the Department of Valuation and Taxation at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. She is an attorney and author of A Good Tax: Legal and Policy Issues for the Property Tax in the United States (2016) and Legal Issues in Property Valuation and Taxation: Cases and Materials (2006). She is a co-author of State and Local Taxation: Cases and Materials (10th edition, 2014), and co-editor of Erosion of the Property Tax Base (2009) and Making the Property Tax Work – Experiences in Developing and Transitional Countries (2008).

Partners

This learning initiative was supported by: