Kartverket flags draft document-duty valuation rule as break with practice

Kartverket warns that the draft chapter 21 of the særavgiftsforskrift on dokumentavgift can be read as changing how the duty base is set.Skatteetaten In its consultation response of 6 October 2026 to Skatteetaten, the land registry authority asks for clarification on a series of provisions where the draft is either vaguer than current law or appears to depart from established practice. The response assumes the new særavgiftsloven has been adopted and addresses only the regulation's detailed design.

The sharpest warning concerns the proposed legal definition of salgsverdi in § 21-1-2 first paragraph: the amount the seller could obtain for the property on the open market absent any community of interest with the buyerSkatteetaten. Read literally, Kartverket writes, the definition suggests the base must always be set from a hypothetical market valuation.Skatteetaten That would deviate from practiceSkatteetaten where the actually agreed price between independent parties governs, even if a subsequent valuation indicates a lower market valueSkatteetaten. lagmannsretten held in LB-2014-164843 that the agreed purchase price had to be used although valuations indicated a substantially lower market value, emphasising that the buyer was in fact willing to pay the price. A similar dispute over an ideal share in a holiday property, where the agreed price exceeds the assumed market value, is currently before Borgarting. Kartverket asks that the notes to the regulation state whether the definition continues current law or changes it.

For expropriation, the draft's sixth paragraph says only that statutory additions to the compensation enter the base. Kartverket considers the base to be the total expropriation compensation actually paid, including statutory additions, and asks that this be stated expressly, since filers regularly ask whether market value or the awarded compensation governs. For jordskifte, the draft's seventh paragraph refers to the co-ownership dissolution rules in § 21-5-1 without reproducing the direct statutory link in current dokumentavgiftsloven § 7 fifth paragraph. Kartverket proposes the wording «Ved jordskifte etter jordskiftelova beregnes avgiften på grunnlag av verdiforskyvningen innenfor jordskifteområdet sett under ett», reflecting practice of assessing the value shift across the consolidation area as a whole, including area exchanges that are not dissolutions of co-ownership.

The split of corrections into after-assessment (§ 21-1-6) and refund (§ 21-1-7) leaves the thresholds unclear, Kartverket writes: the «nye opplysninger» condition appears only in the refund provision, and current practice treats duty as correctly assessed on the information available at registration, with the filer carrying the risk of a correct valuation. The response asks which later information can reopen a salgsverdi assessment — a pre-registration valuation the parties did not know of, or a later valuation or arm's-length sale showing a different value.

Kartverket also flags structural slips: the chapter contains no § 21-2-2, while § 21-2-3 largely duplicates § 21-1-7, and the disclosure duty in § 21-13-1 second paragraph is framed around salgsverdi although the chapter sets special bases for åsete succession, co-ownership dissolution and expropriation. On exemptions, the reorganisation provision (§ 21-8-1) leaves open whether auditor confirmation and Foretaksregisteret documentation are cumulative or alternative requirements, and the invalid-agreement exemption (§ 21-12-1) demands a final judgment or settlement, which is narrower than rectification practice under tinglysingsloven § 18 and misses undisputed cases such as documents submitted for registration by mistake. Earlier inheritance questions — transfers following renunciation under arveloven § 74, intervention in a spouse's inheritance under § 10, and the meaning of «lovens arveandel» — remain unanswered in the notes.

Legal basis: the draft chapter 21 of the særavgiftsforskrift under Lov om særavgifter (særavgiftsloven), cf. tinglysingsloven § 18, jordskiftelova § 3-3 and arveloven §§ 10 and 74.