Vijayawada: Government of Andhra Pradesh is even giving notices to tenants in the name of the occupier to collect property tax of the properties whose owners don’t reside in the corporation or municipality or nagar panchayat and appointed nodal officers at ward and commissionerate level.
Earlier, it was not done, but the present government is using an Act regarding that, which allows government to confiscate the properties of tenants also if the property tax was not paid. This has resulted in substantial growth rate in collection of property tax.
Directorate of municipal administration is monitoring the nodal officers from the state capital and giving orders on daily or weekly basis to work out collection of property tax.
The monitoring by top management is possible through a software developed in the name of ERP module and it is working out well as the government achieved 24.73 per cent of growth rate in collection taxes in municipal corporations, 28.12 per cent growth in municipalities and 3.9% growth rate in nagar panchayats till March 31, 2016 when compared to the year ended with March 31, 2015.
The bill collectors and revenue inspectors are nodal officers at ward level and municipal commissioners and executive officers of panchayats are nodal officers at corporation, municipality and panchayat levels.
According to an officer of joint director level in municipal administration and urban development department (MAUD), top 100 defaulters of the property tax were identified in each civic body and the responsibility of collecting the property tax was given to nodal officers at different levels.
He said that top 100 defaulters were identified in each civic body and top 10 to 100 defaulters were identified at ward level and the responsibility of collecting property tax from was given to commissioners and ward level nodal officers respectively.
According to him, the centralised monitoring using ERP module has cleared monitoring bottlenecks and paved the way for clear collection of property tax.
When asked about how they managed that much growth rate in collection of property tax, they identified under assessment and not assessed properties in all civic bodies and increased their value of property tax.
In doing so, the commercial properties, which are marked as domestic or non-commercial, were identified and the officials are collecting property tax from them, he added.
