CHENNAI: Property taxpayers and tax collectors in the city are equally affected as the poor server quality of the Greater Chennai Corporation has hit the handheld devices provided to tax collectors.
“Due to intermittent failure in the server connection, the tax collectors are struggling to perform door-to-door tax collection,” a Chennai Corporation source said. Apart from the tax collectors have been finding difficulties in taking printouts of invoices, middling internet connection at counters makes taxpayers wait long, according to the source.
It is learnt that the Greater Chennai Corporation has provided more than 150 handheld devices to tax collectors. “Although the devices are given in 2015, they were functioning quite well. But the problem of connection failure has been occurring for last 5 to 6 days,” the source added.Meanwhile, a tax collector said that during March end, they would be able to generate nearly 50 bills against 25 bills on other days. “With the financial year ending on Saturday, the failure of hand-held devices will impact the total tax collection negatively,” the tax collector said. With the issue persisting for nearly a week, the top officials in the Ripon Buildings remain apathetic in attending the issue. “We are repeatedly notifying the issue to the concerned department (EDP Cell), but they are simply directing us to ‘try again’. Most of the time their advice becomes futile,” the tax collector said. According to the Chennai Corporation revenue officials, the civic body had collected nearly '680 crore till Wednesday. “If the concerned officials fail to rectify the issue, we will not able to achieve the target of '725 crore,” he added.
