Civic body to file police complaint against defaulters if they don't clear dues in 15 days.
The Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) is all set to crack down on property tax defaulters. More than 2,700 cheques, deposited towards the payment of property tax between April 1, 2008 and June 3, 2009, have bounced for various reasons. The total amount of money due has crossed over Rs7 crore, which is around 2.4 per cent of property tax collected during 2008-09 by the civic body. The AMC recovered Rs284 crore property tax during financial year 2008-09 as against Rs242 crore recovered in the financial year 2007-08, registering a rise of 17 per cent.
While South Zone is leading in terms of amount, West Zone is leading in the number of cheques that have not been cleared by the banks. In South Zone, a total of 482 cheques amounting to Rs3.44 crore have bounced, while with 603 cheques valuing Rs1.79 crore West Zone stands at the second place, said Mayur Dave, chairman of AMC revenue committee.
Municipal commissioner IP Gautam said that the civic body will issue notices to the defaulters and will ask them to deposit due property tax within 15 days. "We will file a police complaint against all those who fail to clear their dues within the stipulated period," he said.
Although the number of cheques that have bounced is huge, it is barely 2.4 per cent of the total property tax recovered by the AMC every year, which shows that not all tax payers are defaulters. The civic body has therefore decided to give them some time before taking strict measures, said an AMC official.
Dave said that the civic body could not put in extra efforts to recover property tax from defaulters in the first two months of the new financial year because of a manpower crunch. A number of tax department officers were assigned election duty, which affected the work of the department.
It was only in March that the revenue department of the AMC hastened its sealing drive to recover property tax. In fact, many tax payers, who owned commercial properties, had even paid advance dated cheques to avoid sealing of their property.
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