Tasked with tax data cleansing, revenue wing flags glitches in IKM’s software

Thiruvananthapuram: The revenue wing of the city corporation which has embarked on a data cleansing exercise with regard to tax assessment has flagged glaring shortcomings in the IKM software. This is not the first time that the corporation has highlighted the issues and glitches in IKM software and references to similar communications in the past have also been mentioned in the latest letter sent to the head of IKM.
While the corporation needs to update records of around 4.5 lakh tax assessments, the revenue wing has reported that buildings dated from 2016-17 alone can be assessed using the software and it has no facility to register buildings from years before 2016-17 with retrospective effect.
Even though service cess has been calculated in the city corporation along with property tax for the past three years, the software has no facility to add service cess to buildings which were assessed before the service cess came into effect. According to the letter sent to IKM, while merging the data base before 2016, the officials tried posting the tax for a whole year; however, the system would still reflect that of half year. It also lists out other technical glitches like delay, frequent instances of system snags which have delayed the process of data updation.
The corporation has also raised issues regarding the accounting software of IKM. The officials have reported that the collection from zonal offices are ported to the main office in 15-30 days and this has made it difficult for the accounts wing to promptly check the collection records from zonal offices. The glitches in software have also affected the reconciliation process which needs to be done on an immediate basis.
It was following the fund fraud in zonal offices that lack of updated data regarding property tax popped up. The BJP and UDF raised the issue in the council and alleged that people are being made to pay tax repeatedly since the corporation never kept account of tax payments and money was being swindled by the staff. Mayor Arya Rajendran has declared that data updation will be completed within a month.
The report submitted to the urban affairs director regarding the issues in tax data highlight lack of proper database, delay in proper updation (posting) as two major issues which have led to data inaccuracy regarding tax payment. The addition of wards following delimitation, rearrangement of wards, tax revision which marked a shift from annual rental value to plinth area necessitated huge transfer of data and updation of information.
It so turned out that in many cases, the updation and transfer was incomplete which led to a situation where people have to furnish previous tax receipts while paying for a specific fiscal or else their accounts will show arrears of previous financial years.