The Hindu : Front Page : Multi-storeyed commercial buildings under civic scanner

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Sunday, Dec 31, 2006
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Multi-storeyed commercial buildings under civic scanner

Staff Reporter

CHENNAI: The Chennai Corporation is putting all commercial multi-storeyed buildings in the city under the scanner to ascertain whether they had been assessed properly before levying property tax.

The drive is significant following the recent uncovering of gross violation of assessment of a multi-storeyed building at Ekkatuthangal. Two officials — a joint engineer and an assessor — are facing disciplinary action. The loss of revenue in that case is reported to be nearly Rs.50 lakh per half-year.

Over the past week, random checking of buildings on Anna Salai revealed that several had been under-assessed. The officials are now pressing for a re-check of all commercial multi-storeyed buildings.

Senior officials pointed out that the Madras High Court-constituted monitoring committee, looking at implementation of orders quashing all regularisation proceedings, had asked them to monitor the plans and approvals of multi-storeyed buildings cleared recently.

A civic official said the exercise was born out of necessity. The civic agency had not revised its property tax since 1998. However, over the years, revenue through taxes had increased primarily due to crosschecking and verification. "Verification of multi-storeyed commercial buildings is a necessity. Bringing under-assessed properties to book will give the much-needed revenue increase. It is important since we are planning a lot of capital works."

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