Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (301)

UK Liberty at Liberal Conpsiracy, rebuts the baseless claim that there would be endless appeals and/or that [relative] valuations are impossible thusly:

On valuations, some figures from Denmark, where they have LVT, property tax, and service tax:

5m inhabitants
43k sq km
1.9m properties
valuation staff:
Central office - 16
8 regional offices - 150 total
7 regional appeal boards - 20 total
7 appeal secretariats - 25 total
= 210 staff

appeals of 2002 valuation:
39k appeals or 2.05%
6k to regional board or 0.31%
310 to national board or 0.02%
10 to court system (can only do this on questions of law)
- Development of Danish Land Valuation PPT

See also Property Valuation and Taxation in Denmark
http://ida.dk/sites/ddl/Documents/08_valuation_and_taxation.pdf
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Or, closer to home, the UK has Business Rates, which is a lot like LVT but the valuations are more complicated because they take the bricks and mortar into account and Council Tax, which is/was a fairly crude banding exercise. :

The work of the VOA encompasses:

• compiling and maintaining lists of rateable values of the 1.7 million non-domestic properties in England, and the 100,000 in Wales, to support the collection of around £25 billion in business rates; [that's an average Business Rates bill of £14,000]

• compiling and maintaining the lists of council tax bandings of some 23 million domestic properties in England and 1.3 million in Wales, to support the collection of around £26 billion in council tax;

According to page 66 of their Annual Report 2011-12, they have just under 3,000 employees keeping all those valuations up to date.

Under proper LVT, valuations for commercial land and buildings would be a lot simpler but valuations of residential would have to be a bit more sophisticated because there would be more bands (at least twenty or thirty), broadly speaking the workload wouldn't change much (it can all be computerised, everything can be indexed up from year to year, and so on).

The VOA's total running costs including salaries, IT and so on are about £200 million a year, i.e. 0.4% of tax collected; and only about two or three per cent of Business Rates and Council Tax go uncollected. That's not absolutely brilliant, but far, far better than for any other taxes (collection costs approx. 1% and evaded and unpaid taxes about 10%).

The Valuations Tribunal deals with appeals against Business Rates and Council Tax valuations. There were 180,000 appeals against Business Rates valuations in 2011-12 (that's one-in-ten valuations, but three-quarters were agreed within the year) and 2,040 appeals against Council Tax bandings (that's one-in-twelve thousand bandings), see page 7 of their Annual Report 2011-12. The Tribunal employs about 80 people.