The reassessment of properties within the Coimbatore Corporation limits have resulted in the civic body getting an additional ₹ 6.64 crore.
The exercise was being carried out by a team of 546 personnel. All the 4.83 lakh taxed properties in the city - individual houses, apartments, shops, shopping complexes and industrial units - will be checked to match records with the corporation.
The teams started the exercise in July this year based on Corporation Commissioner K. Vijayakarthikeyan’s orders to ensure that no property in the city was neither under-assessed nor not assessed.
The teams went about physically measuring each and every property. They had thus far - as of August 24, 2017 measured 95,541properties and found 76,305 to be conforming to records. Of the remaining 19,236 properties, only 577 were not assessed at all. The rest were under-assessed.
Corporation officials said that the under-assessed properties fell into a few broad categories - tiled roofed houses renovated with concrete roof, houses that had a shop or two attached, the first or second floor of a house used for commercial activity, additional construction that was not reported to the corporation and a few more.
During the exercise, if the teams found deviation in construction, they also slapped fine on the property owners at 50 paisa a sq ft for the additional construction. This was in addition to the demand for tax for 13 previous half-years (six-and-half-years).
Corporation officials said that the exercise was yielding rich dividends as completion of just around 20 % of the task had yielded ₹6.64 crore. By the time the teams completed the reassessment, the corporation expects to increase its tax demand by at least ₹ 40 crore to take the total demand to nearly ₹180 crore a year.
The current tax demand for a year was ₹145 crore.
