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Fight the Property Tax - Boycott Property Tax Forms

category national | bin tax / household tax / water tax | press release author Wednesday March 13, 2013 00:13author by CAHWT Report this post to the editors

Fight the tax for bailing out speculators and gamblers!

To defeat the property tax YOU have to get involved Don’t register for the tax – do not return the form which the Revenue Commissioners will send to you in March Go to your local public meeing when it is held and find out how you can become an acive member of the campaign Join any local or naional protests which the campaign organises.
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The Government call it a Property Tax but it’s really a tax on the family home and once they get the foot in the door with this tax it will only rise. Along with the water tax (which comes in next year) households will be hit with bills of 1,000 euro a year and more before too long.

Five years of austerity have hammered ordinary people. No more. The Government must be stopped in their tracks on this one.

These robbers are planning to deduct the tax straight from wages, social welfare, pensions or farm payments if you refuse to sign up for it. It is a new income tax and a new social welfare cut all rolled into one!

And for what? Everybody knows that those who say that it will improve local services are lying. Everybody knows that they want the bondholders to be the winners once again.

But can it be fought? Can it be defeated?

YES. It’s not just a fight against the Revenue, it’s a fight against the Government. And this Government is weak. Both parties are on the back foot. Labour is particularly under pressure and pressure should be piled on over this issue.
The first step should be for a huge number of people to boycott the registration process. Ignore the Revenue correspondence. Ignore the registration deadlines in May. Even if they threaten to double your property tax for refusing to register people should still boycott. Last year they threatened court cases and 2500 euro fines for the 662,000 households who boycotted the household charge. But they couldn’t implement the penalties because the opposition was so large.

A massive boycott of the property tax forms will put the Government under real pressure. However, a boycott on its own is not enough because the Government have given the Revenue the power to deduct the tax from wages and social welfare on July 1st.

This means that the Government must be forced back – either on the property tax or on the threat to deduct.
How can this be done? Only by a massive protest movement. This means huge numbers on the street (see ad for national demo), it means political pressure, it means civil disobedience, it means industrial action (see articles inside). In this way a blow can be struck against the property tax, against the plan to introduce a water tax and against the entire austerity agenda.

Such a movement will have to be built in communities and workplaces across the country. Thousands of volunteers are needed. Join the Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes (CAHWT) today.

author by barbarosapublication date Wed Mar 13, 2013 17:55author address author phone Report this post to the editors

fight this tax and get even heavier penalties,this is irresponsbile of you to suggest that you simply ignore this tax,its like ignoring bills,it doesnt go away it just gets worse and more costly in the long run,something people on the poverty line cannot afford to do..

author by Tpublication date Wed Mar 13, 2013 20:20author address author phone Report this post to the editors

You have till July 1st to pay the property tax. You will not get any penalty if you wait until then. So at the very least if everyone waited to then it will still send a message to the government of how unpopular this tax is.

If last year, everyone had paid the Household charge on time they would have quickly escalated that to several hundred euro. By not paying or not paying on time, this delayed the whole thing by at least a year. That translates into savings of about 500 euros for most houses. That's a lot of money for people who don't have it.

Sometimes you have to put up a fight and you have to make sacrifices. That is how we got the modern social era where it is expected that one gets paid for sick days, is entitled to annual leave, the 8 hour day is a standard and so on. However people have inherited these gains which were achieved by a lot of sacrifices, dedication and hard work. The capitalist system has been steadily taking back all these gains in the last decade or two and this has very very much accelerated since the crisis. Perhaps we have allowed these things to slip away because the masses as a whole had taken these things for granted and had not fully appreciated them and thus were not willing to fight to keep them. I don't really know.

What I do know is that caving into the government so they can bailout the rich, just means you will be screwed more and sooner.

author by Rational Ecologist.publication date Thu Mar 14, 2013 10:43author address author phone Report this post to the editors

If one is self-employed and doesn't pay this tax then Revenue will not issue a Tax Clearance Cert, thereby having a direct negative impact on the business. This is hugely unfair to the self-employed, many of whom earn very little money and do not have the pay and conditions of some(I STRESS SOME) in the public sector.

author by Chestnut - Concerned citizenpublication date Thu Mar 14, 2013 14:26author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Unrelenting pressure is being placed on people who are older, people with disabilities and particularly those who have had to face a fall in financial circumstances be it due to unemployment, their business going into liquidation or retirement.

Apartments are in a glut situation countrywide yet according to the Revenue valuation sheet received today, certain apartments in Dublin 4 are categorised in the £400,000+ category. This is penal and inequitable. These forms do not take account of the size of the premises. Some of these apartment blocks are around for decades but the management fees are often in excess of £3,500 per annum. There is no regulation that make management companies more accountable either.

People may say and possibly rightly so, why did you choose D4 in the first place and I would reply why not? No-one can read the future and D4 covers Donnybrook to Ringsend to Ballsbridge to Sandymount and there are many people occupying these properties who have been targeted for the "FOUR" part of Dublin and are now living under immense stress and pressure as they are told to value their own homes and if they go wrong, it is the new Mandarins in the Citadel of power who will decide your fate.

When will apartment owners be treated fairly? Priory Hall - a scandal which is a constant and a forewarning to other apartment complexes. Dublin City Council are responsible for a small proportion of these apartments and they provide for the security of their allocation on the site. The newspapers report that now the cost of security to date is higher than the alterations needed to bring the apartments up to standard (£39,000 per apartment to date!). Some Architects suggest this entails taking away existing space to make changes that make the apartments comply with the necessary fire regulations. What we know is that the owners ie families are out of their homes for over 500 days now. Will these people be billed for their management fees and what are the management fees now? But worse again, it does not look as if they are covered by the exemptions eg pyrite/Ghost so will they too have to pay property tax and if so, how are they supposed to assess the value of their properties.

£400,000 category in Dublin 4 for half year and going forward each year until 2016, when you add £3,500 pa for management fees indicates to me that apartment blocks are going to spell real trouble for owners which if demand and supply market factors are taken into account would mean there should be a significant discount on the value of apartments.

People in other countries are encouraged to down-size especially in their elder years. Many have done so and now they are targeted in a way that is hostile to them via the Revenue Commissioners.

What do they do? Pay in fear and go without food while the world assumes Dublin FOUR is affluent.

author by Tpublication date Thu Mar 14, 2013 14:46author address author phone Report this post to the editors

If people are paying €3,500 on management extortion fees then they should call a meeting of all the people living in the apartment blocks and try and organise to collectively stop paying it until the fee is lowered. Rent strikes in the past for other circumstances have worked extremely well and there is no reason it won't here.

At the very least they should be demanding and getting a set of detailed accounts and then question every figure line by line and cross check that charges and payments for certain services are really for the amount stated and not inflated on the accounts too.

I'd be willing to wager that a lot of these management fees are just mechanisms for certain people to cream off a lot of money for nothing whilst the people employed / contracted to do the actual maintenance are paid buttons.

author by R Neuville - Home Tax Petitionpublication date Sun Mar 17, 2013 22:49author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Home Tax Petition site suggests paying the Household Tax by cheque in 12 monthly installments.
12 x 1.8 million = ?

Related Link: http://www.HomeTaxPetition.net
author by Tpublication date Sun Mar 17, 2013 23:38author address author phone Report this post to the editors

The campaign against household and water taxes have issued a legal FAQ on what to do about the Property Tax and Revenue Notice.

It has been uploaded here and can also be found on the CAHWT site at:

PDF Document CAHWT Legal FAQ on Property Tax 0.05 Mb


Related Link: http://nohouseholdtax.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/FAQ-legal-subgroup-1.pdf
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