| If you find a property-tax bomb in your mailbox, you have three options — forage for receipts of past payments in your files, dial your tax lawyer or just pay up. Decades of corruption and deliberately shoddy documentation of payment records in the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) have come back to haunt the taxpayer rather than those responsible for it. Chandramouli Datta almost fell off his chair last month when he received a payment notice from the civic body, saying he owed it Rs 1.09 lakh in property-tax arrears dating back to 1992. The Bhowanipore resident couldn't understand why the CMC was asking him to pay tax for an apartment that didn't exist in 1992. "I had bought the property last year and my annual tax at the current rate is Rs 10,368. I couldn't have completed the mutation process without a tax clearance. How can they ask me to pay Rs 1.09 lakh latest by April 30?" demanded Datta. Here's why: the CMC's record books show that no tax has been paid since 1992 for the land or building that stood there before an apartment complex came up. "It's possible that the previous owners did clear their dues, but the payment records weren't updated. The only way Datta and the other apartment owners can escape paying the arrears is by procuring and producing the old receipts," a tax lawyer said. Across the CMC belt, these are taxing times for more than two lakh property owners, many of whom have never evaded taxes. The amounts they have been asked to pay range from Rs 3,000 to Rs 3 crore, with some of the dues dating back to the 1960s. Sources blamed the CMC's history of poor documentation and corruption for the nasty surprise. "The coffers are empty and the civic body needs to dig deep to restore a semblance of fiscal health. If the records show unpaid taxes and the taxpayer hasn't preserved receipts for previous payments, the CMC will go after them," an official said. The CMC sends supplementary tax bills on two grounds — as and when there is a general revaluation or when someone is found to be a defaulter. The CMC Act of 1980 stipulates a general revaluation every six years, but officials say the process remains pending for up to four terms. The upshot of this is a huge burden on the taxpayer when the value of a property is finally reassessed. "This is the primary reason for tax default. As months turn into years, interest and late fee keep adding up. Worse, somebody who buys a property with clearance from the CMC might end up being saddled with the bill, as is happening now," the official said. The worst sufferers in the CMC's tax mop-up are those who might have paid their dues but did not preserve all the receipts. "If a house owner receives a supplementary demand notice for the period 1960-80 and cannot produce all the receipts as proof of payment, he or she will have to pay the amount with interest accumulated over two decades. Every CMC receipt carries a message at the back that the taxpayer must preserve it," the official said. According to a conservative estimate, taxpayers shell out not less than Rs 100 crore extra every year just because they don't have receipts of all past payments and the civic body's records don't show the relevant tax credits against their or the previous owners' names. The unfairness of it all is that the CMC isn't accountable for not maintaining records — that's also allegedly the oldest corruption trick in the civic body's book — but the taxpayer is liable to pay dues twice over for not possessing all the receipts. "The trend of sending notices for property-tax arrears began after the computerisation of CMC records. Earlier, tax-collection data would be entered in the revenue register. But clerical lapses, deliberate or inadvertent, were rampant. When computerisation started, all the data entered came from these incomplete registers," said a senior official of the taxation department. Not that tax collection post-computerisation has been clean. Before wide area networking and local area networking started in 2008, payment data used to be stored in standalone computers rather than a central server. So if an operator erased someone's data and pocketed the money, there was no simple way of detecting it until the taxpayer received another bill many years later. "The Gariahat treasury scam is a classic example of such manipulation. Over Rs 500 crore of taxpayers' money had been misappropriated by erasing entries from standalone computers," recounted a source. Mayor Sovan Chatterjee admitted that shoddy documentation of past tax records was a big problem, only to lay the blame at the CPM's door. "The question of sending supplementary demand notices dating back to the 1960s wouldn't arise had the Left Front government at the time of implementing the CMC Act of 1980 (on January 4,1984) notified that past dues till 1983 would be written off," he told Metro. Rupa Bagchi, the leader of the Opposition in the CMC, said it was a shame the mayor was badmouthing the very system that could save the board from insolvency. "Had the then Left Front government written off the arrears, could the mayor have introduced the waiver of interest scheme that he hopes will now bail out the board Trinamul runs? This is double standard," she said. So who will stand up for those taxpayers who are being forced to pay huge amounts for no fault of theirs? "I admit there is a possibility that a large number of apartment or house owners will be affected just because they don't have old tax-payment receipts. But such is the rule," said the mayoral council member (revenue), Debabrata Majumdar. Under Section 232 of the CMC Act, demand for unpaid property tax is not barred by limitation of ownership. The onus of payment is transferred automatically with the transfer of property. "It's a rule that has been upheld by Calcutta High Court and the Supreme Court," said a senior assessor and tax collector in the CMC. Former mayor Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharayya advised property owners to preserve all receipts and make sure before buying a plot of land, a building or an apartment that all tax arrears have been paid. "There's little we can do about how records were maintained by the CMC in the old days. I had appointed PricewaterhouseCoopers as consultant to suggest possible solutions, but there is no alternative to not having receipts of past payments. Even photocopies will do," he said. Have you received a notice for property taxes already paid or dating back to a year when you weren't the owner? Tell ttmetro@abpmail.com | 
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