A plan to adjust housing and land taxes is still in the works but has yet to become a set policy, Minister of Finance Lee Sush-der said Monday. Fielding questions at a hearing of the Legislative Yuan's Finance Committee on whether the Ministry of Finance (MOF) had abruptly put brakes on its housing and land taxes adjustment plan, Lee said the ministry's Taxation Agency was still working on it. On ruling Kuomintang (KMT) Legislator Lin Te-fu's suggestion that the government respond to public concern over skyrocketing urban housing prices, particularly in metropolitan Taipei, by raising housing and land taxes, Lee said the time wasn't right. 'A good policy should be carried out with good timing... Although the domestic economy is gradually bottoming out of a year-long recession, it is still not a good time for tax hikes, ' Lee said. Generally speaking, he went on, only 3 percent of local people would be affected by an upward adjustment of housing tax, but as there are gaps between government-evaluated property values and market prices, tax hikes could trigger misgivings among the public. On reports that Premier Wu Den-yih had instructed the MOF to shelve its proposal to change the current single tax rate on residential housing units to a five- tiered system based on property value, Lee said the Taxation Agency was still studying the issue and that no decision had been made. Moreover, Lee said, the question of whether those who own luxury houses should pay higher housing and land taxes should be addressed by local governments rather than the MOF. For example, he said, the Taipei City government is actively promoting a plan to have luxury homeowners pay higher housing taxes. Meanwhile, Lee said that in the future, when the government put up state-owned land plots on auction, it will add a clause allowing it to buy back the plots if the winning bidders fail to develop them two years after acquisition. At the moment, Lee said the government would only put land lots smaller than 500 pings (1,650 square meters) up for sale. In Taipei City, sale of small land plots in prime districts have also been suspended. Provisions in the Civil Code, Lee said, give the government the right to buy back undeveloped land. Noting that the proposal is mainly aimed at preventing financial groups from hoarding land lots for property speculation, Lee said the number of 'buy-back' cases will be few because sales of public land have traditionally accounted for less than 1 percent of the country's total annual real estate trading. 