TEHRAN- Iran National Tax Administration (INTA) is going to start collecting taxes on vacant houses as of the next Iranian calendar month (begins on January 21), Tasnim reported on Monday, quoting an official with Transport and Urban Development Ministry.

“The information regarding vacant houses is being sent to Iran National Tax Administration using Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) protocol or manually,” Deputy Transport and Urban Development Minister for Housing and Construction Affairs Mahmoud Mahmoudzadeh told Tasnim.

According to the official, so far, the information related to 1,174,000 vacant houses has been communicated with INTA.

“We are going to also send the data regarding the units owned by legal entities to INTA within one or two days,” Mahmoudzadeh said.

Mahmoudzadeh had previously said that in the first stage of the implementation of the program for collecting tax from the country’s vacant housing units, only units belonging to natural persons are targeted.

The vacancy tax law, as part of Direct Tax Reform Law, was put on the agenda in the Iranian calendar year ending March 2016 and was enforceable from the year ending March 2017, but there was little data on the number of vacant units then, according to Mahmoud Alizadeh, a senior official with the INTA.

The mentioned plan is mainly aimed at lowering the housing rental rate in the country.

In mid-July 2020, the Iranian parliament (Majlis) approved the double-urgency bill of the vacancy tax law and it was decided that the mentioned law would be implemented in July 2021, however, the implementation of the new law was postponed due to technical issues.

Expressing his agreement over the approval of the mentioned plan, Hossein Hossein-Zadeh Bahraini, a member of the Majlis Economic Committee, said, “Our problem in the housing sector is not the demand higher than the supply, while the number of residential units is more than required.”

This plan is vital, as many families are struggling for renting the homes, while there are many empty units, the MP further reiterated.

EF/MA