BHUBANESWAR: In a bid to scale up revenue from trade licences, Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) is planning financial awareness camps to groom traders on acquiring the civic body’s permission before starting a business. BMC had recently started sending emails to all registered traders for applying or renewing their trade licences.
Currently, BMC collects `1000 to `6000 from around 10,000 traders towards trade licence fees. However, there are around 23,000 small and mid-level businessmen who operate without paying any fee to the Corporation. Till January 2017, BMC’s collection towards trade licence was `1 crore while the collection during 2015-16 was `75 lakh only.
‘’We expect the collections to rise significantly during February and March this year. In the last one month, close to 100 habitual defaulters have been identified and they will be penalised,’’ Additional Commissioner, BMC Alok Kar said.
The BMC had recently assessed the performance in revenue collection and decided to enhance it. The service performance level of tax collectors was also reviewed and targets were fixed for the coming financial year, Kar said.
As the financial year is coming to an end, collection of taxes has become a major concern of BMC. The civic body needs to strengthen the system of collecting revenues from trade licences after the list of businessmen operating without licence is prepared. The revenue cell of BMC has collected data base of VAT registered traders from Commercial Tax Department, sources said.
The special camps will focus on organisations who have not obtained licence so far. These will be asked to apply for the same from the dedicated trade licence camps. These camps will be conducted for a week at 12 different locations in the City. After the camps, if it is found that commercial activities are running without licences, actions will be taken against such organisation as per the Odisha Municipal Act regulations.
The Zonal Deputy Commissioners and Tax Collectors have been directed to strategise revenue collection to meet their respective targets. Sources said BMC is planning to achieve a target of `90 crore revenue from various sources including holding tax, user’s charges, advertisement, trade licence, parking fees and rents from different markets by the end of this fiscal.