BENGALURU: Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) is expected to fall well short of its property tax target of Rs 3,723.25 crore for the financial year 2017-18, with only 53.4 per cent of the target collected so far. As of Thursday, the collection stood at Rs 1,988.65 crore, according to figures provided by the office of Mahadev M, the chairman of the Standing Committee on Finance and Taxation.
Only two months left in the financial year 2017-18, which ends on March 31, officials expect Rs 200 crore to Rs 300 crore more, which will still leave the BBMP short of Rs 1,000 crore, but will be a modest increase from the previous year’s collection. For 2016-17, about Rs 1,900 crore was collected against a target of Rs 2,300 crore.
Property tax is the major source of revenue for the civic body and its collections have a direct impact on the budget outlay. And yet, the civic body has no account of how many property owners were served notices. “The proposal to enable zonal offices to issue notices online is under discussion,” BBMP Joint Commissioner (Revenue) M Venkatachalapathy said.
A BBMP official said a bloated target was deliberately set to justify higher expenditure set at the start of the financial year. The source added that the process of issuing notices was full of loopholes as it was done by officers at the zonal level. “Sometimes, councillors ask them not to collect taxes from certain people who vote for them,” the source said.
Srikanth Vishwanathan, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the NGO Janaagraha, said outsourcing the collection process may help BBMP increase its collections so that the civic body can focus on assessments. Regarding this year’s collections, he said, “The positive aspect is that this will still be the highest tax ever collected by BBMP. About four to five years ago it had collected just Rs 700 crore, and it has continuously increased over the past five years. But the increase from last year has been modest.”
