Have you been correctly charged for development land usage?
The development land usage fee (“NUSZ”) is a compulsory tax payable to the municipality where the land is located. The NUSZ is payable for the use of development land located: (i) in towns and built-up areas; (ii) in areas zoned for housing and other complex construction; (iii) in areas covered by a spatial implementation plan; (iv) and in other areas serviced with water and electricity networks. NUSZ zoning is very much within the autonomy of the municipalities, which zone these areas in line with their own ordinances. They also lay down the criteria for setting the NUSZ and NUSZ exemption (full or partial) criteria.
In setting NUSZ, municipalities are required to take particular account of: (i) services available on the development land and the possibility of connecting it to the existing municipal infrastructure; (ii) the location of the development land (whether it is on the outskirts of a town, in a town centre, etc.); and (iii) the purpose of the development land (residential or commercial, etc.).
According to the above factors used by the municipalities to define the land, the NUSZ is then calculated according to the surface area of the land. The Financial Administration of the Republic of Slovenia (“FURS”) taxes and collects the NUSZ for the municipalities based on the information received from the municipalities. It is, therefore, important that this information is correct and reflects the actual situation, which in practice is not always the case.
Each municipality keeps its own NUSZ payment records, which do not always match the official records or the actual data. While municipalities have access to data from official registers (such as the land register, the land cadastre and the public infrastructure cadastre), not all municipalities properly align or update their records. Thus, it may happen that the data used by the municipality to set the NUSZ do not take into account, for example, amendments to zoning acts, upgrades to communal facilities, the development status of the plot, ownership changes, etc. Discrepancies between the records and the actual situation are sometimes also due to the incompleteness of the official registers, which sometimes do not contain all the information required (e.g. purpose/activity, surface area of the building) or are not accurate.
In addition to the problem of defining the taxable subject matter, the question of who is a taxable person often arises in practice, particularly in the case of leases. According to the provisions of the Building Land Act, the NUSZ payment obligation falls on the direct user of the land or building or part of a building. A person required to pay the NUSZ is, therefore, not necessarily the owner but may also be, for example, a tenant, a precarist, a holder of an easement or any other user of the development land. In practice, the owner and the user often agree individually, especially in lease agreements, who will pay the NUSZ.
However, municipalities usually obtain information on the obliged persons from official registers, which only show the ownership of the individual properties but not who the actual direct occupant of the property is. Therefore, they generally consider the owners of the real estate as the taxable persons – after all, they are required to ensure the data used by the municipalities for setting the NUSZ reflects the situation on the ground. If there is a change of user and thus of the taxable person, the taxable person should notify the municipality of this change so it can update the taxable person’s particulars in its records, ensuring the correct information is reported to the FURS to issue the fee decision.
However, a change of the taxable person for the current year can also be made after the FURS’s decision has been issued. The FURS issues the NUSZ assessment decisions once a year, by 31 March for the current year or within three months of receipt of the information provided by the municipality. If during the year there is a change of the person required to pay the NUSZ, the taxable person who has already been issued with a decision for the current year has the right to request, within 15 days of the change, that the decision be amended. This is done by submitting an application to the FURS to reduce the obligation and to charge the new taxable person the corresponding NUSZ amount.
With new NUSZ decisions soon to be issued (or have already been issued), you are advised to check as soon as possible the information about your property kept on file by the municipality. If the information on file does not reflect the actual situation, you should communicate this to the competent municipal authority and propose that they amend this information. Otherwise, the information that the municipality has or can access without your cooperation will be used to assess the NUSZ. If you have already been issued with a decision based on incorrect information, you have the right to appeal.
Author: Klavdija Kek, Attorney-at-Law
