The number of people transferring land titles to their chosen heirs has soared ahead of the implementation of the new inheritance tax law, the Land Department reported.
Lands staff were overwhelmed by the applications, Somkid Sari, the department’s adviser on performance efficiency, said.
Transactions had increased by about 20% since October.
Offices in Bangkok in particular had been pressed to accommodate the extra workload. Some offices had been forced to remain open until 9pm in the last week of December.
The legislation passed the first reading in the National Legislative Assembly on Dec 18 and was referred to a committee for scrutiny expected to take three months.
The bill seeks to impose a 10% levy on bequests which exceed 50 million baht.
Mr Somkid said transfers to heirs of titles to land valued at over 100 million baht rose significantly. As a consequence the department’s collection of fees and taxes rose by more than 20% to over 80 billion baht in 2014. He expected it would also rise by about 20% in 2015.
Mr Somkid said the department currently had collated information on about 15 million plots of land of the 33 million titles nationwide submitted for transfer through the department.
It was delivering the information to the Finance Ministry’s Treasury Department for appraisal of the lands' value.
So far it had found that land prices had risen about 20% over the past year.
The Lands Department was working with the Treasury Department on land price appraisal across the country. So far, only eight million blocks of land had been appraised in 25 provinces by the Treasury Department.
Government agencies planned to have a database of appraised land prices that reflected the actual value completed sometime in 2016.