Identification of top 500 defaulters in each of the Urban Local Bodies (ULBs) bill collector or docketwise, formation of special teams involving officials from every department, daily area-wise targets and a publicity blitz is to be unleashed to alert the house owners of the urban areas across Telangana to pay property tax by the end of March 2021.
Time schedules
Director of Municipal Administration N. Satyanarayana, in a communication to the municipal commissioners concerned, has instructed for preparation of time schedules for 100% collection of property tax by roping in sectional heads of all departments.
Top defaulters should be identified based on the demand raised and the assessment amount made in descending order, and those who have been found to be defaulting on the payments on a regular basis should be contacted personally by the municipal commissioner concerned, apprising them of the need to pay up or face legal action.
Top defaulters, whether government or private, should be displayed prominently on the municipal websites and also on the notice boards of the municipality concerned. Bulk messages should be sent to the property owners’ mobile phones on a daily basis if they are found to have not paid the property tax yet.
Collection break-up
While 85% of tax should be collected by the bill collector, the other 10% consisting mostly of high tax defaulters and chronic ones should be handled at the supervisory level of engineers, planning officers and managers.
The municipal commissioners should be personally involved in the collection of the remaining 5%. With regard to the government buildings tax collection, the respective district collectors should be contacted for payments on time. The director wanted the commissioners or the additional commissioners in his or her absence to hold meetings with the special teams to review the collections on an everyday basis with the regional directors monitoring.
Tax redressal melas should be held in all the municipalities and in ward offices, community halls, with residential welfare associations to deal with any kind of revision petitions for taking on-the-spot decisions wherever possible or make use of the online correction provisions made feasible recently. The regional directors of Hyderabad and Warangal have been asked to keep a watch on ULBs with low tax collections.
