I&T@GHMC aids high property tax collections

HYDERABAD: The slew of online payment gateways and technological facilities such as EPOS devices for property tax collection has been cited as a major factor in the improved tax collections for the just-concluded financial year 2011-12 by officials of the finance department in GHMC.Statistics provided by the corproation show that of the Rs 640 crore collected as property tax, Rs 367.43 crores has been received through EPOS handheld billing device and close to Rs 112 crore has been received via gateways such as AP Online, GHMC website online payment and e-Seva alone.Of this total amount filed online, e-Seva has clocked the highest collections at Rs 99.65 crore, followed by GHMC Online at Rs 6.41 crore and AP Online gateway at Rs 5.52 crore. Circles 9 and 10 in the Central Zone have recorded the highest figures for all forms of payments, with combined figures of Rs 50.7 crore collected via e-Seva, Rs 2.37 crore via GHMC website Online payment, Rs 1.35 crore via AP Online and Rs 114 crore through EPOS bill collectors.Further, the technical staff of the IT department of GHMC have disclosed an emerging trend of a number of NRIs making good use of the facility, with more than 2700 registrations being done from USA, 700 plus from Saudi Arabia and 390 from the UK, apart from a few hundred hits reported from countries like Canada, Singapore, Australia and countries in the Gulf region, which has a considerable Hyderabadi population.Many of these property tax filings took place in the last couple of weeks prior to the closure of the financial year, claimed the staff of the IT department. An official with the finance department confirmed the same adding, “the number of hits received for online property tax payment this year was higher than last year, and was aided by the fact that many NRIs took advantage of the facility, as can be observed from the number of international hits received in the past few weeks alone.”