Taxation of silos with property tax – gloss to the decision of the Supreme Administrative Court of 17 October 2019, ref. no. II FSK 3126/17

Abstract

The gloss highlights the problem of taxation of construction objects, which despite having all features of a building as defined by property tax law, are qualified as structures by the administrative organs. In a discussed decision, the Supreme Administrative Court (SAC) has ruled that for property taxation purposes, a sugar silo should be qualified as a structure, not as a building (in the sense of provision 1a section 1 of Taxes and Local Fees Act). SAC’s decision matches the opinions of the administrative organs and the court of lower instance. SAC’s reasoning is mainly based on a teleological interpretation of provisions of tax law and building law. The court comes to a controversial conclusion and posits the thesis that to qualify a construction object as a building, its functional elements such as purpose, equipment, and the way and possibility of using this object as a whole, should be taken into account. The gloss argues that this kind of interpretation causes the addition of another, non-statutory premise of qualifying construction object as a building. The decision in question constitutes the preservation of relatively consistent administrative courts’ jurisprudence, which the authors mean to criticize. The gloss aims to show that this decision constitutes a repetition of jurisprudence from before the Constitutional Tribunal’s sentence of 13 December 2017, ref. no. SK 48/15 and includes theses inconsistent with its content, as well as with the literal interpretation of provisions – similarly to previous verdicts in analogous cases, released after the Constitutional Tribunal’s sentence.