Coimbatore Corporation will soon embark on an exercise to remove double entries in property tax records. With the revenue wing staff returning from election duty, the work will start shortly to identify and delete property tax records of those assessees who no longer owned properties but their details continued to reflect in their books, says a revenue wing officer.
Such duplicate entries came to light when the Corporation decided to identify and collect tax from top 10 defaulters in each of the 100 wards, says Commissioner Sravan Kumar Jatavath.
A perusal of the records of the top defaulters showed that they had not paid for years together. When he questioned it, bill collectors replied that the properties with the defaulting assessment numbers no longer existed. The buildings were demolished but the assessments were not deleted in their books. Or, the buyers of such properties had taken new assessment numbers without the old one getting removed. And, for the non-existent buildings the Corporation had been raising property tax demand. That was how the civic body stumbled on double entries.
In an instance, the Corporation found that while the records for an assessment number showed default in payment for nearly 10 years, the Corporation had property tax coming in from another assessment number for a building that has been built demolishing the property that had the defaulting assessment number. This triggered the exercise, Mr. Jatavath says and adds that he has asked the bill collectors to identify such duplicate entries. The impact of this exercise will be that the number of defaulting assessments will come down and so will the payment associated with those properties. In other words, the outstanding amount under the ‘tax arrears to be collected’ head will come down and that will show an improvement in Corporation’s financial health.
The revenue wing official says the bill collectors will be able to look at double entries by looking at their digitised property tax records and only in very few cases have to inspect the property.