CHENNAI: The plan to improve property tax collection may be on track, but the city corporation’s IT infrastructure is struggling to keep up. The tax collection for the second half-year between October 1 to 15 surpassed the target of Rs 150 crore and registered Rs 214 crore, mainly owing to its 5% rebate promise. However, frequent server failures led to delays, causing embarrassment to the staff.
“We conduct special property tax camps in areas where there are big apartments and gated communities. We mobilise people, but when the time comes for residents to pay, our handheld devices show ‘server down’, and the residents get angry. It stays down for two to three hours,” said a tax collector on condition of anonymity.
According to corporation data, in the last half-yearly (April 1-Sept 30), Rs 246 crore of the total Rs 698 crore collection (around 35% of the collection) was received through the website and mobile applications and most of the remaining Rs 452 crore were collected by tax collectors.
Some residents who paid through the website said the amount was debited, but the payment did not reflect for several days. “I showed them (corporation staff) my bank statement since the transaction status was pending, and they manually updated it,” said Sriram C, a resident.
Senior corporation officials told TNIE that they have brought the pending and failed transactions down over the last few months. “We are working with banks and our team to change the scheduling algorithm to process the transactions even if one’s status is pending. Earlier, if a transaction was pending, the ones in the queue would be stuck,” said a senior official.
Now, the number of pending transactions has been brought down from thousands to an average of around 30, said officials. As for the server, officials said they were planning an upgrade soon.