Tax recovery process hit as 75% property IDs yet to be self-certified in Faridabad

Nearly 75 per cent of the property IDs in the city are yet to self-certified. This has affected the process of recovery of the house tax from majority of the property owners.

According to sources in the Municipal Corporation Faridabad (MCF), while wrong or incorrect entries during the survey and generation of the property IDs is reported to be a major factor, the slow work in correction of the ID details and self-certification is also a matter of concern for both residents and the civic authorities. Self-certification by the owners was mandatory so that the civic body had a proper and complete record of the units and there was no confusion or hurdle during the time of recovery, said an official. He said despite the resolution of the majority of the complaints, only 25 per cent of the property owners had got their IDs self-certified.

The city has a little over 7 lakh properties registered within the civic limits. As many as 5 lakh new units have been added on the portal of the Urban Local Bodies Department in the past four years. However, discrepancies have proved to be a bottleneck in the process.

Alleging that the ID of a flat that was yet to be purchased was generated wrongly, Jayshree Gaur, a resident of Sector 85, said the officials did not verify the status of the property as she had been awaiting full refund ordered by HRERA due to a fault on the part of the builder.

Deepak Chaudhary, a former MCF member, said he had to submit house tax of over Rs 54,000 twice after the civic body had no record of the first payment made. Alleging a glitch in the system, he said nobody in the department knew where the money had gone. The delay in self-certification is likely to adversely affect the recovery of property tax as there is a huge gap in the actual and expected collection. An amount of around Rs 70 crore had been collected against the expected over Rs 200 crore last year.

MCF Additional Commissioner Swapnil R Patil said with the regular disposal of complaints, less than 5 per cent of these that had jumped the deadline as a time limit had been fixed by the government. He said incomplete details, wrong linkage with another ID, family disputes, mismatched mobile numbers and unawareness had hit the self-certification process. Besides Samadhan Shivirs, zonal teams had also been engaged in door-to-door verification. The details of IDs of the major tax defaulters were being checked and a sealing action might be launched against the defaulters, he said.