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NDMC soft on wealthy defaulters: Audit report

Sandeep Joshi

Fails to collect house tax from over 5,500 property owners

NEW DELHI: Year after year the audit reports of the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) have been revealing the civic body's failure in improving collection of house tax and going soft on wealthy defaulters, but still its officials have failed to learn any lessons. As a result, the NDMC in recent years has failed to collect house tax from over 5,500 property owners amounting to a whopping Rs.200crores.

Interestingly, there are several such taxpayers whose outstanding over the years have surpassed crores of rupees. There are at least 25 such property taxpayers whose tax liability has crossed Rs.1crore, while around 40 house owners owe the civic body tax between Rs.50lakhs and Rs.1crore and the number of defaulting taxpayers with dues between Rs.25lakhs and 50lakhs is over 50.

Survey

Similarly, the NDMC has to collect tax between Rs.5lakhs and 25lakhs from over 500 taxpayers, between Rs.1lakh and 5lakhs from over 1,300 defaulters, from Rs.50,000-Rs.1 lakh around 70, while 3,200 taxpayers have to pay house tax up to Rs.50,000. Thus, there are over 5,800 properties on which house tax arrears of over Rs.230crores have accumulated over the years.

One peculiar case in this context is related to properties that have come up in the Anant Ram Dairy area near Bhikaji Cama Place. The entire locality came into existence around 1950 but the NDMC failed to conduct a survey of the area till 2000. It was after this that it was "known" that a posh colony comprising around 85 highly expensive properties had come up over the years enjoying all basic amenities being provided by the civic body without paying any taxes.

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