The Comptroller and Auditor General of India (CAG) has pulled up the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation for lapses in the assessment and collection of property tax. The local body lacks an integrated database of public and private properties and is backward in the maintenance of records, which has severely affected its ability to realise the tax, says the CAG report on Local Self-Government Institutions for the year ended March 2012 released on Thursday.
A total of Rs 8.81 crore was not levied as property tax due to the failure in bringing all assessees in the tax net or not collecting the tax at the appropriate rate, the CAG found.
‘’Complete and accurate data on all assessable public and private properties such as residential and non-residential properties, Central and state government properties, properties of autonomous bodies etc is a pre-requisite for raising proper demand. This has the added benefit of detecting unauthorised structures. Audit noticed that the Thiruvananthapuram Corporation had no comprehensive database of all assessable properties,’’ the report noted.
Though the information with the Corporation’s Town Planning wing could have been used to create a centralised database for property tax, this was not done as there was no coordination between Town Planning and Revenue wings. In the absence of such a database, the only way to detect newly constructed buildings was to trace them using construction permits or the completion reports from the owner.
But the Corporation does not maintain a permit register, the basic record for issuing permits for new constructions. ‘’The columns for recording the essential details (plot area, Floor Area Ration, date of receipt of completion report, date of assessment etc) were kept blank. No register/record was maintained in Town Planning and Revenue sections for noting the details of Ocs issued/received. Details of assessments made were not passed on to Town Planning Section by Revenue Section for noting in the permit register,’’ the report said.
The CAG has instructed the Corporation to adopt GIS mapping to list all properties and to tax all eligible parties. Proper maintenance of Permit Register and ‘’effective co-ordination’’ between the Revenue and Town Planning sections of the Corporation are the other two important recommendations made by the CAG vis a vis Property Tax.
