In a first of its kind move, the Chandigarh municipal corporation has issued around 25,000 property tax clearance certificates to taxpayers of the city. All the clearance certificates are system-generated documents developed by the civic body authority.
Also, from now onwards, there will be no ambiguities related to the property tax deposit. Earlier, people used to complain that even after depositing the tax amount, they were receiving notices.
“Around 80,000 property taxpayers have deposited their full amount and arrears also, we have issued around 25,000 clearance certificates so far and the process is going on to issue all the certificates by the end of this month. All the clearance certificates of the current financial year are being issued to both residential property taxpayers as well as commercial property taxpayers,” said an official.
The tax department of the Chandigarh municipal corporation has tied up with the postal department in this regard and thus these clearance certificates are being given through speed posts. As the certificates are being given sector-wise or area-wise, their record is also being updated regularly in the system. The manual work has stopped in order to bring transparency in the system.
“Since the data of people falling in the tax ambit has been uploaded in the computerised system, it thus automatically generates the list of the people who have paid tax for the current financial year and who all are pending. Based on the data, the clearance certificates are being issued,” said sources.
Earlier, loss of tax receipts, ambiguity in the tax amount and flaws in the documentation were the key issues in the manual working of the tax branch. The matter was raised multiple times during the monthly general house meetings by the municipal councillors that the MC was sending notices for payment of tax. But for people who had already paid their tax amount, but lost the receipts, had nothing to show in manual and ended up paying again. But with computer-generated documents, all these issues will be settled.
