Land Registry Reform to Include Digitization & Better Land Tax System

Back in 2013, former Prime Minister Dean Barrow didn’t mince words when he called out the Ministry of Natural Resources, especially the Lands Department, as a breeding ground for corruption. There were stories of desk clerks practically demanding “incentives” or gifts just to do their job of processing land documents. If you didn’t play along with this corrupt game, your paperwork could take forever or even mysteriously disappear. Fast forward to today, the P.U.P. Government is promising to clean up this mess. They’re planning to digitize the land registry, push through new land laws, and improve the land tax collection system. Prime Minister John Briceño shared more details about these plans today.

 

Prime Minister John Briceño

“There is a process when you are transferring land from one person to the other, maybe the people at Lands could have been more vigilant, probably. maybe some may be involved, I don’t know, but yes, I think there’s a lot that has to be left to be done in the Lands Department. There are a number of things that we want to put into place. First of all, the DPM has given me a copy of the proposed legislation for real estate agents – to regulate that industry. It is something that I started working, I had it pretty much ready when I resigned back then in 2007, but it seems that the previous government had no interest in working on that. Or D.P M obviously got carried away – well, I shouldn’t say got carried away but was tied up with all of these land cleanings that he continues to do. And then he finally has this bill ready to take to Cabinet and then to the National Assembly when the elections came upon us.  In his mind, the timeline I think he was working was November, 2025. So he did not have it ready, but to take it to the National Assembly. But we’re working on that, so we have that ready and that’s going to be a priority in the next government. Secondly, we’re looking at digitizing the land registry on the titles unit because once we can digitize that, it slows down. It makes the issue off fraudulent transactions more difficult because then there is a digital imprint of what is happening. And so we want to do that, not only to prevent fraud, but also to provide a more effective and efficient service for the private sector. And thirdly, we need to be able to digitize the land tax unit of the ministry and see once we can digitize that. And maybe look at how the Lands Department can partner with the Belize Tax Service to be able to have a more effective and efficient ways to be able to collect land tax. I am told, and I may be wrong, that we have as much as a hundred million dollars in land tax to collect. But we collect maybe ten or twenty percent of that. So we have to be able to digitize it, modernize it, and then to be able to collect that money is in a timely fashion.”