Citizens living in self-occupied homes and those waiting for their residential properties to be assessed by the Pune Municipal Corporation for tax will not get the 40% concession that has been the practice for nearly five decades.
The civic administration, acting on a state government directive, has discontinued the concession. The government, which reviewed the scheme, rendered it null and void after an audit objection.
“A scheme introduced in the 1970s after the Panshet floods offered a 40% discount on property tax. The proposal has been scrapped by the state government and the discount will no longer apply. We have started implementing the directives,” PMC’s additional municipal commissioner Rubal Agrawal said.
The state also directed the PMC to recover the discount offered to residential properties from owners with retrospective effect.
The order from the state government does not need any ratification from the corporators. The proposal was tabled before the standing committee for “information”.
Standing committee chief Sunil Kamble told TOI that their meeting was adjourned on Tuesday and the proposal did not come up for discussion. “I will have to read the proposal,” he added.
While the civic administration has begun executing the order for new residential properties, it has put on hold the recovery from old properties.
All the newly added properties are being charged a tax bill without the concession and there are restrictions on offering the discount to old properties which have to be assessed.
“We are not sure how to execute the order with retrospective effect. The tax structure has changed several times in five decades. It has been calculated with several other rebates. Calculation of the tax amount for old residential properties that availed the concession will be near impossible,” a senior civic official said.
Properties that have got the benefit will not be subjected to any change this financial year. “Their tax bills were issued with the discount. It may be recovered later once it is decided how to do it with retrospective effect,” the civic official added.
He admitted that recovering the money from tax payers will be tough as calculating such a pending levy will not be feasible. “Hence, the recovery with a retrospective effect has not been started,” he added.
Digitisation of property tax information started in 2004. All previous data was collected manually. There are around 11 lakh assessed properties including those in the 11 merged villages. Nearly 70% of these are self-occupied while rented properties amount to 3.3 lakh.