BENGALURU: The long-planned move to begin online payment of property tax by the BDA from May 1 will be delayed by another fortnight. Reason being, officials in the authority’s revenue department are still in the process of calculating the increased tax amount to be paid, owing to the hike effected in the guidance value this year.
The scroll on BDA’s website that had been flashing in red for a month stating ‘Payment of property tax will be made online from May 1’ has dropped the date and has merely retained the month of May on the scroll. It may be recalled that from April 1, BDA had stopped accepting both online and offline payments for property tax, as it wanted to make property collection online from this year.
A BDA official told TNIE, “We will ensure the online process starts before May 15. We are on track to start it within 10 days but to be on the safe side, we have fixed a fortnight from now as our new deadline for the online process.”
Explaining the reasons behind the delay, the official said that many BDA officials were roped in for election duty. “The revised property tax to be paid by our property holders could not be computed due to lack of sufficient time to calculate. Also, banks which collected property tax on our behalf up to March 2019 could not submit payment details, as many bank officers were posted on poll duty. Even yesterday, we received some bank receipts,” he said. Unless, the amount collected up to the previous financial year is exactly computed, we cannot update the new property tax to be paid by an owner, as arrears (if any) too need to be added to it, he explained.
The Stamps and Registration department had hiked the guidance value from 5 to 25 per cent on January 1, 2019, with the exact hike in a property dependent on its area.BDA collected tax from its 79,332 properties up to March 2019, which will shoot to nearly 97,000 properties this year. “The 10,000 sites allotted in both phases of Kempe Gowda Layout and some properties developed by private developers with BDA approval have been added,” another official said.