The revenue department of the city corporation has issued notices to more than 42,000 defaulters asking them to pay their property tax arrears. The defaulters owe the corporation a total of around 60 crore .
The decision to issue notices was taken by corporation commissioner M Prathap after holding a meeting with revenue officials recently. Most of the defaulters are hotels and educational institutions. While only a few of them had appealed to the taxation appeal committee or the high court disputing corporation’s claims, the remaining are willfully refusing to pay the money.
A revenue official said efforts taken by the department are paying off slowly as they have collected around 10 crore of the arrears since April. “While the first notice has been issued to defaulters recently, another notice would be served to those who were still refusing to pay. If there was no response even after the second notice, the corporation can cut off water supply to defaulters’ buildings to force them to pay,” the official said.
“After the meeting with the commissioner, each assistant revenue officer was given a target to collect arrears ranging between 75 lakh and 1 crore in 15 days. Besides, each ARO was also given a target of 10% of the current year (the financial year 2022-23) demand of property tax.”
According to revenue officials, there are around 5.40 lakh property tax assessments in the city. In the financial year 2021-2022, the civic body collected 189 crore from these assessments. With the revision of property tax recently, the civic body expects to collect an additional of 165 crore during the financial year 2022-23.
