PS: State Should Refund Fees Paid by People Due to Dysfunctional Land Registry

Bratislava, March 4 (TASR) - The opposition Progressive Slovakia (PS) party has proposed that the state should reimburse people for the fees that they had to pay in connection with the recent dysfunction of land-registry office, PS MP Jan Hargas told a news conference on Tuesday. The party wants to have the issue enacted in a law that it's submitting to Parliament. The law also includes proposals for systemic solutions in the future, the aim of which is to increase motivation among offices to provide services of adequate quality. "We're submitting a bill to Parliament that we've given the working name 'Lex Cadastre'. In line with the law, the state should compensate people, refunding them all the fees that they had to pay at land-registry offices between January 5 and the end of March," said Hargas. Following the cyber-attack on the land-registry office, people had to obtain paper copies of title-deed extracts, which are necessary, for example, to get a mortgage, and they had to pay a €12 fee for each such extract. This service was previously available online and free of charge, explained Hargas. PS in the bill proposes systemic solutions that should prevent such situations from reoccurring in the future. If people are forced to use only a paper version in the event of a failure of the state's electronic services in the future, they should pay a discounted fee for it, equalling no more than the fee for the electronic service. The party also thinks that in the event of extensions of deadlines for processing applications due to technical issues on the part of the state, fees should be refunded to people, or they should be exempt from them. "We view these as systemic proposals for the future because, as we see it in the case of the land-registry office, this office isn't motivated in any way to restore these services as quickly as possible," said Hargas, adding that the land-registry office collected over €0.5 million alone in fees for paper extracts of title deeds issued due to the cyber-attack. ko/df