Civic bodies to deploy ‘intelligent’ systems for better tax collection

HYDERABAD: To increase the property tax revenue by identifying leakages and also for easier administrative monitoring, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) has proposed to implement Property Tax Intelligence System, an advanced analytical intelligence solution for revenue improvement. Once approved, civic bodies across the state may follow suit.

The GHMC wants to develop the advanced property tax system called ‘Property Tax Analytics Intelligence Solution’, to tap property tax from unassessed and underassessed properties. For instance, in areas like Somajiguda, Punjagutta, Ranigunj and many other commercial areas, about 80%  of the properties are either non-residential or commercial in nature. However, the data available with the GHMC shows that only 50% of the properties are non-residential or commercial and the remaining are residential. There is a revenue leakage of 30% as the commercial property owners are paying the tax as per residential rates.

With the proposed system, the aim is to calculate accurate property tax, create a database, curb errors in tax calculation and bring the underassessed properties under tax net. Sources said that the civic body has around 18 lakh Property Tax Identification Numbers (PTINs), whose tax demand generation and collection is done annually. The GHMC’s property tax application developed and maintained by the Centre for Good Governance (CGG) does not have the database for analytical intelligence solution. So to increase the revenue by identifying leakages, the GHMC has decided to implement an advanced analytical intelligence solution.

The end-to-end property tax intelligence system is aimed at identifying and improving low rate of tax filing, high arrears, identifying data  misrepresentation, erroneous, fraudulent property assessments and evasions. The expectations from property tax intelligence system are that the revenue tax collection would significantly improve, intelligence and analytics engine would monitor suspicious entities, and an investigation interface would evaluate alerts.