Waive interest and penalty charges on BBMP property tax notice due to zonal changes
Waive interest and penalty charges on BBMP property tax notice due to zonal changes
Thousands of Bengaluru residents have received a property tax notice from BBMP stating that they are tax evaders and have been filing tax under a lower Zone which is classified by BBMP since 2016.
The notice details the difference and also applies a 200% penalty on the tax due and a 24% interest P.A. - since 2016. These notices are dated February 2021 but are being served to many residents only in June/July.
What's the problem?
Zonal Classifications are BBMPs way of denoting the rate of the property tax the owner has to pay to BBMP. These were changed in 2016. They are determined by BBMP and owners were supposed to look it up based on street details uploaded to the BBMP website in 2016 in PDF documents. The online tax payment system did not identify a property in it's correct zone when the PIDs or Application numbers were entered - not in 2016 and not in the subsequent years in the same block period when the zonal classifications remained the same. Hence citizens continued to pay taxes according to what the online system said was due, unaware that they were supposed to check in these PDF documents and re-classify the zone their property falls under and then pay the tax.
A 24% interest P.A. and 200% penalty on the deficit amount for all the years tax was paid under the lower zone since 2016 adds up to more than 400% of the deficit amount as of today.
What is BBMP saying?
Under the self assessment scheme for property tax payments, it is the owners duty to properly declare the property details including the zone it is classified under. Hence the owners are at fault for this incorrect declaration and hence have to pay the dues as served in the notice. If property owners had doubts about their zone declarations, they should have contacted their respective ARO office and got it clarified before they paid their taxes.
What is our contest against this?
Zone classification is something that BBMP decides and is mostly unknown to the common citizen. Changes in these zonal classifications were updated to the BBMP website in 2016 in PDF documents that tax payers had to look up their streets in their respective ward document and figure out the zone for themselves.
- Zone changes were not informed to property owners personally and were left to find this out either by visiting the ARO office or looking it up on these ward wise notifications on the BBMP website - even on which the breakdown is only at the street level and not at an individual property level - hence causing further confusion of a street appeared on multiple zones.
- In 2016, when most of us tax paying citizens went online to pay our dues as we normally do, the online system did not automatically select the changed/updated zone for our property when we entered our property details.
- In the subsequent year, BBMP did not assess this error and serve a deficit notice. According to the Self Assessment Scheme, a scrutiny or re-assessment is done at random and must be completed in the subsequent financial year failing which it lapses and BBMP loses it's right to perform the scrutiny for that year on that property.
- BBMP decided to do a re-assessment of property taxes paid by property owners from 2016 to 2019-20 in the year 2020 and hence found this discrepancy in thousands of property tax payments.
- We are not tax evaders and have not willfully evaded or paid less taxes. We've paid what the system said is our due every year.
What is our demand?
- BBMP must rescind this notice that calls us Tax Evaders or Defaulters.
- BBMP must waive the interest and penalty charges as a one-time correction offer for tax payers who have received this notice.
- BBMP must issue a corrected notice that does not quote us as a tax evader and denote only the actual tax due and give us a reasonable amount of time to pay this due.
Please read the articles appearing in popular newspapers regarding this BBMP atrocity: