Faridabad civic body to seal properties of tax defaulters

Bijendra Ahlawat

Faridabad, October 3

The Municipal Corporation Faridabad (MCF) authorities have announced that they would launch a sealing drive against 14,000 major defaulters of property tax. As per information, the MCF is to collect an amount of nearly Rs 200 crore as tax.

“A drive was launched in March to push up tax collection before the end of the last fiscal. This is the first such drive in the current financial year. Around 13,000 notices have been served in the past two weeks in nine zones of the civic body,” an MC official said. Moreover, the MCF has initiated action against the defaulters and around six units had been sealed in the NIT zone in the past week, he added.

67 days to clear amount

A defaulter gets up to 67 days to clear the pending amount. He gets a week’s time after he receives the preliminary notice, 30 days as hearing period and another 30-day period for final notice. —Padam Singh Dhanda, Zonal taxation officer, MCF

Defining the category of major defaulters he said, it consisted of the commercial and residential stakeholders who owed an amount of Rs 30,000 or more as property (house) tax to the MCF. This included around 6,500 defaulters who had to pay a tax amount of Rs 50,000 or more.

Almost 60 per cent of the total 2.6 lakh property tax units in the city had been in the defaulter list, sources in the civic body said. The total tax paying units in the city would rise to 5.50 lakh after the integration of another three lakh units identified in a survey carried out during the last fiscal. The number of defaulters might be around 1.55 lakh, the sources claimed.

“As notices have either been served or being issued as per rules, the sealing action will be initiated within a stipulated period if the defaulters fail to clear the pending amount,” says Padam Singh Dhanda, Zonal Taxation Officer of the MCF.

Giving details of the process, he said a defaulter got a total time period up to 67 days to clear the pending amount. He also got a week’s time after he received the preliminary notice, 30 days as hearing period and another 30-day period for final notice. Claiming that the total pending amount as on date was being ascertained, he said the MCF had recovered around Rs 30 crore this year. Though the target was around Rs 300 crore, an amount upto 25 per cent would had to be foregone in the form of rebate offered by the government.