American Samoa Has No Real Property Tax

A veteran moving to American Samoa from a state, or reading a benefits guide written for states, will look for the disabled veteran property tax exemption. There is not one, and the reason is not that American Samoa declined to help veterans. There is no real property tax to exempt anyone from. Title 11 of the American Samoa Code Annotated is the revenue title, and its chapters are: general provisions, filing of federal tax liens, income tax, amendments to the Internal Revenue Code, miscellaneous taxes, excise tax on imports, secondhand imported items tax, excise tax on exports, tax incentives for businesses, foreign sales corporations, economic development financing, and the American Samoa Finance Committee. There is no ad valorem chapter, no assessor, and no roll. The code has no counterpart to the property tax articles that carry the headline veterans benefit in almost every state in this catalog. This follows from the land system rather than from tax policy. With roughly ninety percent of the territory communally owned by aiga under matai, and with Code 37.0204 restricting who may hold land at all, an annual tax assessed against the value of land would collide with the whole structure of Samoan land tenure. American Samoa raises revenue from income tax, a two percent wage tax, excise taxes on imports, and business levies instead. One provision is worth knowing about because it is the only thing in the code that looks like a local property levy. Section 11.0101 lets the Governor, on the request of a district, county, or village chief or on his own initiative, authorize and direct that chief to levy a special tax for a special purpose, with whatever restrictions on method and purpose the Governor thinks appropriate. That is a village assessment for a stated project, not a standing tax on your house, and there is no veterans exemption written into it. So the practical answer for a veteran in American Samoa is that the housing benefits worth your time are the loan programs, not the tax relief. This catalog's American Samoa housing entries are about getting a house financed and built, because that is where the money is. If anyone tells you there is a disabled veteran property tax exemption in American Samoa, ask them which code section. There is not one to cite.