Thursday, 01 April 2021 | PNS | Dehradun
With the end of the financial year 2020-21 on March 31, the Municipal Corporation of Dehradun (MCD) has collected about Rs 35 crore. It failed to achieve the set target this year too. The corporation will soon start imposing penalties on the property tax defaulters.
In the financial year 2019-20, the corporation had set the target to collect Rs 50 crore but the property tax of about Rs 43 crore was submitted by the taxpayers due to the Covid-19 induced lockdown, as per the officials. According to them, the Covid-19 pandemic also affected the tax collection this time too. They said that the corporation started the offline tax submission service in MCD premises from the month of June which usually starts from April. Due to financial crisis during the pandemic, owners of many small businesses converted their commercial establishments into residential properties that affected the revenue collection as the major portion of the property tax comes from the owners of non-residential properties. The officials disclosed that the property tax of around Rs 15 crore of various government and non-government buildings is still pending in the corporation. The buildings with the maximum pending property tax mainly include Government Doon Medical College (GDMC) with about Rs 90 lakh, SIIDCUL with Rs 1.77 crore and secretariat with Rs 68 lakh. The officials asserted that the corporation would have achieved the target of Rs 50 crore if these bodies would have deposited the tax. According to the municipal commissioner, Vinay Shankar Pandey, the MCD will prepare the list of all the registered buildings with pending property tax in the first week of April and would subsequently send them notices to deposit the tax with the 15 per cent penalty of the due tax. If the submission of the property tax is late by 30 days, the late taxpayers have to pay five per cent of the penalty as the delay fee to the corporation, disclosed the officials.
The municipal tax superintendent informed that about 1,20,000 residential and non-residential properties are registered in the corporation so far and only about 60,000 property taxpayers deposited the tax in the last financial year that generated about Rs 35 crore. They also added that since the rebate of 20 per cent also ended with the financial year, the property owners with due taxes would have to pay a penalty for the late tax submission. The mayor Sunil Uniyal ‘Gama’ had also expressed his apprehension earlier that the pandemic had severely affected the property tax collection and the low revenue collection might hinder the development projects in the city this year.
