BENGALURU: In order to identify those who try to cut back on paying heavy stamp duties for sale of property by classifying it as different transactions so as to attract lesser charges, the state government will soon deploy an artificial intelligence (AI)-based mechanism to flag such attempts.
According to the Stamps and Registration Department, wrong classification of properties to avoid heavy stamp duty charges is a major drain on revenue generation. The department is the third highest revenue-generator for the state government and had collected Rs 9,041 crore in 2017-18. Around 80% of this was collected through stamp duty fees.
K V Thrilokchandra, Inspector General of Registration and Commissioner of Stamps, said that for sale deed registration, 5% of the total cost of the property has to be paid as stamp duty fee, which is the highest component. Other property-related transactions attract lesser stamp duty fee. “Some of the users avoid paying the correct fee as they register the documents in different categories. In such cases, the seller, the buyer and even the officials are involved. Though there will be no change in the end result, the sale itself will be registered under a different category,” he said.
For example, when a sale of the property is registered as a gift or as an execution of a will, it attracts lesser stamp duty fee and the buyer and seller escape by paying much lesser than they are legally bound to. To identify such cases, the department is now opting to deploy an AI-based software under the e-governance Act. The software has been developed with the help of the Pune-based Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC).
“We will pick a few keywords that are widely used in sale deed documents. When the buyer or seller attempts to pass off a sale deed as some other document, the software will scan the document and isolate keywords which indicate that it is an outright sale of property. An alert will then be displayed on the official’s screen,” Thrilokchandra added.
Presently, the sale deed is executed at the end of the selling process. “We can detect the wrong classification only when the document is presented for registration. Since the document would have been submitted, we can collect dues from the buyer,” he said adding that the keywords would be regularly updated to ensure the system could not be cheated.