Property tax determination period hiked under UAA: KMC

Kolkata: The Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) has decided to increase the time frame for determination of property tax under Unit Area Assessment (UAA) method to a period of three months

It may be mentioned that as per estimates of KMC, of the city's 7.5 lakh assessees, just over 40,000 tax payers have so far applied for the new system. The civic body's move comes in the wake of a poor response from the property owners in this regard.

The UAA was introduced in the month of April and after eight months, the tax payers are yet to accept the new method. Mayor Sovan Chatterjee, who recently held a meeting at the KMC headquarters along with concerned officials, had expressed concern over these figures and had said that a more simplified and scientific method is to be churned out of the existing form of UAA.

It may be mentioned that some anomalies were pointed out by Chatterjee in the calculation of tax under the UAA meeting. He had asked the assessment department officials to simplify multiplicative factors, such as location of a building, its age etc.

"Weightage of some multiplicative factors needs to be altered in order to attract the house owners to accept the new system without any doubt," a KMC assessment department official said.

It has been learnt that the assessment department will bring out an amended system that will simplify the assessment of this tax by the month of February.

"There are some unnecessary queries sought from a property owner which have made a section of them scared about filling up the forms. Some property owners simply don't understand how to fill up the new UAA form. We need to simplify the format of the forms too," the official added.