Сadastral engineers’ responsibility for the cadastral works implementation

Currently, cadastral engineers carry out work on land, buildings, constructions, premises, objects of unfinished construction, including land surveying, measuring of objects of capital construction, which provide preparation of documents containing information needed to implement cadastral registration on such sites.

Cadastral activities can make a person holding a valid qualification certificate of cadastral engineer.

Initially, such work was undertaken by surveyors in the framework of territorial land management and the staff of the Bureau of Technical Inventory (BTI). If the citizen intends to obtain ownership of land, he should follow the procedures for allotment of land, surveying, and cadastral registration. To do this he must refer to the cadastral engineer.

As a result, the cadastral engineer makes up:

• 1)    the demarcation plan, which is required for the registration of the property in state bodies;

• 2)    the technical plan developed in the collection of documents for placing a property on the account;

• 3)    the act of examination, which is required further by the cadaster body to de-register from the tax authorities.

There are lots of complaints about the work of cadastral engineers in the Rostov region. The reason is poor qualification of cadastral engineers, citizens can't have cadastral registrations.

According to statistics, the main reasons of the discrepancy in the provided documents are the inconsistency in form and content, as well as violation of the rules of procedure for approval of location of land boundaries.

In some cases, in the preparation of boundary plans cadastral engineers do not always use all the necessary documents stipulated by the current legislation. Sometimes the customer negotiates the boundaries of the land. But it is the direct responsibility of the surveyor.

In this regard, many developed countries recognized lifetime liability of the cadastral engineers for the results of their work, and the responsibility passes to their heirs.

The knowledge of the cadastral engineer should be very wide and various, it includes in-depth knowledge in the field of civil, land, forestry, urban planning and housing legislation, in taxation and information systems, and many other things.

We can notice insufficient qualifications of a significant part of the current cadastral engineers in the issues of demarcation of land plots nowadays. So, today only a third of cadastral engineers has a specialized higher education. This has a negative impact on the quality of work they do. So, if professional land cadastral engineers have no more than 7 failures when setting on cadastral registration, the people who received the certificate after a short training have more than 40 failures.

Another problem is that the cadastral engineers do not have to join a self-regulatory organization. The state register of cadastral engineers today provides information about more than 32 thousand professionals, while the self-regulatory organization involves only 22 % of them, i.e. only 7 thousand people. The rest people are freelances or hold a contract with an organization and they accept responsibility neither for the citizens nor for the community. But dissatisfied with the quality of services citizens have the civil right to sue the organizations that hired these engineers. Federal law of 24 July 2007 No. 221-FZ "On state real estate cadaster" (hereinafter — Law on cadaster) does not require mandatory participation in such organizations. However, at this stage of the formation of the Institute of cadastral engineers such obligation would be appropriate.

The possibility of membership in such organizations of juridical entity, rendering services in the form of cadastral activities, should be also considered. Self-regulation on the basis of the Law on cadaster is very problematic. According to this law, self-regulation in cadastral activities is possible only on the membership of individuals as a basis, a professional activity. And there are a negligible number of individuals as entrepreneurs.

Consequently, the bulk of cadastral engineers will work in firms where there is a license for geodesic operations. The customer signs the contract for cadastral works with the juridical entity which takes the responsibility for their implementation.

So, if a cadastral engineer makes more than 10 errors, he forfeits the certificate. It is a big disadvantage for a self-regulatory organization.

Moreover, Article 14.35 of the Code of administrative offences of the Russian Federation in respect of the cadastral engineer provides liability for misleading information included in the landmark plan, certificate of approval of location of land boundaries, the technical plan or examination act, if this action does not contain penal act, in the form of imposing of an administrative fine in the amount of five thousand rubbles or disqualification for the term up to three years. [2]

In addition to criminal and administrative liability the Law on cadaster provides such kind of administrative punishment of the cadastral engineer as the cancellation of the qualification certificate. One of the grounds for revocation of the passport to date is the introduction of more than a dozen times during the calendar year by body of the cadastral account of the decisions on refusal in the implementation of cadastral registration on grounds related to violations of the cadastral engineer of the requirements established by the Law on cadaster, to perform cadastral works or the registration of the relevant documents prepared as a result of such works.

Work on improvement of the legislation on the state cadastral registration of immovable property and cadastral activities should be linked to the development of civil legislation in the part of registration of the rights to work on improving rendering state and municipal services, as well as with the existing technological possibilities in this field [2].

So, to improve the responsibility of cadastral engineers it is necessary to do the following:

• 1)    oblige the cadastral engineers to join a self-regulatory organization;

• 2)    add the Law on cadaster, prescribing the necessary requirements for cadastral engineers;

• 3)    include into the requirements for attestation only specialized education, such as, higher education, specialty: land use, law, soil science, construction, geodesy and cartography;

• 4)    withdraw the certificate of cadastral engineer only after the consultation with a self-regulatory organization;

• 5)    as a result of cadastral works is the landmark plan, the requirements of the cadastral engineer should specify the necessary extent of knowledge in geodesy.