Stamp Duty

[drplokta]

Apparently, the Tories have decided to raise the stamp duty threshold to £250,000 for first-time buyers only. Can anyone come up with a workable definition of a first-time buyer for purposes of this policy (remember that the taxman can't ask to see documents more than seven years old)?

Comments

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

Presumably there will be a record that person X has claimed this tax relief so that they can't claim it again. There are already plentiful ID checks when buying/selling a house (passports are very useful for this) so I don't think an ID database is required, even if it did work.

No system can be made perfect, so we shouldn't assume that can be done here. Obviously avoidance of stamp duty through fraudulent claims of being a first time buyer will be a crime. So it's rather like any other form of tax relief, isn't it?