Tamil Nadu Urban Infrastructure Financial Services ... - Municipal

Issues Recommended Interventions
Rate of
taxation and
monitoring
Increasing
assessments
1. Implementation of quinquennial ARV revision as recommend by SFC and
removal of distortions in rates wherever existent.
2. Apart from collection efficiency, the ratio of assessments to population
and growth of assessments should also be tracked and monitored at
the highest level.
3. There should be changes instituted to the policy of Vacant Land tax to
introduce steep step up in taxes for vacant land particularly in peri-urban
areas to incentivise development. Vacant land are often prone to abuse in
the form of encroachments, poor maintenance and dumping of garbage.
Therefore an increase in Vacant land tax can be ploughed back for
supporting the costs municipalities often incur in managing and preventing
such abuses.
4. Property tax information of various residential units should be published
online in the same manner as the guideline values that are published
5. Move to GIS-based database to track, update and retrieve property tax
information
6. It should be made compulsory for all new building constructions to
display the building permission details obtained from the municipality
for construction. The municipality should actively encourage its citizens to
report unauthorised buildings construction and should disseminate online
information on action taken on such constructions to dissuade such activity.
Capturing information on unauthorised construction at the initial stages
through such efforts would go a long way in preventing the rampant growth
of unauthorised and unassessed constructions in our towns and cities.
7. Conduct a one-time survey to compile database of properties and initiate
sample checks in all wards on an ongoing basis. The Commissioner
should undertake ‘surprise checks’ on a regular basis in various wards
to provide a sense of enforcement both to the municipal officials and to
citizens for encouraging compliance.
8. Reconcile and link assessment information with building permissions
issued and initiate a drive to bring unassessed properties under the tax
net.
9. Reconcile manual and computerised registers to identify and bring in
left-out assessments into the tax net.
10. Blanket exemptions should be reviewed. Revenue loss due to exemptions
should be compensated by GoTN.
11. A strong coordination between departments within the municipality by
itself bring significant increase in assessment base and collection
efficiency. The Revenue department should reconcile its information across
various databases on households and other commercial properties available
within the municipality. Specific suggestions in this regard are listed below:
o The Property tax database should be regularly updated based on the
status of Building permissions issued by Town Planning department
o Whenever the Engineering department provides water and sewage
CCP cum BP - Krishnagiri Municipality 79