DC Expose: Greater Chennai Corporation staff help property owners avoid crores
Chennai: In a major setback to the cash-starved Chennai Corporation, it has just come to light that a few revenue officials have been fraudulently reducing the property tax slab of commercial buildings in Chennai to benefit private property owners. The loss of revenue caused to the civic body exchequer, according to corporation insiders, could run into several crores. The property tax arrears in Chennai, even with such rampant cases of under-assessment, are said to be in excess of '700 crore now.
The modus operandi of the errant revenue staff is to target buildings like hospitals, mansions, hotels, commercial multiplexes and marriage halls and help the owners get their taxes reduced.
There are also cases in which building owners have been encouraged to file cases in court seeking tax reduction so that during the pendency of the case there is no need to pay the tax. Ironically, several of these cases also ended in favour of individuals due to technical errors committed by revenue department staff, informed sources told DC.
“The incident has now forced the top brass of the corporation to crack the whip on the errant revenue department and a few of the staff have been asked to furnish clarifications to the corporation commissioner”, a senior official said.
According to social activist D. Mani, who has filed an RTI petition with the Chennai corporation seeking transparency in matters related to tax slabs, there are too many technical parameters while assessing taxes.
Buildings are classified in several categories as commercial, non-commercial, special buildings, rented, self occupied and non-rental and all such technical classifications help the tax assessors and revenue staff to engage in illegalities.
“The tax of a hospital is calculated using its bed strength, but the bed strength is often under assessed. In case of marriage halls, the total charge collected from public is not disclosed and people declare properties as self-occupied, but they rent it out for commercial purposes”, said RTI activist R Gopalakrishnan.
Former Chennai corporation commissioner Rajesh Lakhoni introduced online birth and death certificates to weed out corruption in their issuance.
More online applications should be entertained, Mr Gopalakrishnan said. He demanded common provisions for the public to check the property tax paid by others through a common platform like a corporation website. Those who help the government to crack tax evasion should be rewarded, he suggested.
Case law
Papers available with DC reveal that a non-residential commercial building in Triplicane was converted into a residential building on March 27, 2016, and again after two months the residential structure was reclassified as non-residential building. During this period the independent building, a mansion located in commercial Chepauk area in Muktharunnisha lane, showed three different tax arrears in the past four months.
The arrears on March 27, May 30 and June 6 showed Rs 61,785, Rs 1,85,356 and Rs 3,32,636. When contacted, a corporation official attributed the changes due to two factors. The mansion owners have filed court cases seeking reduction in tax rates and based on the court order, the tax rates were reduced, but the software installed in the corporation server failed to accept the revised rates and hence the discrepancy in figures. The issue is under examination, the official added.
