Most of the hotels and restaurants owners are depositing the property tax in the Municipal Corporation of Dehradun (MCD) of the financial year 2019-2020 while avoiding the submission of the property tax of this year due to the drop in business during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The operators of several commercial bodies had approached the Dehradun mayor Sunil Uniyal ‘Gama’ a few months ago to provide some relaxations regarding the property tax this year owing to the financial crisis caused due to the pandemic.
However, no relaxation has been approved by the mayor so far for the taxpayers of commercial properties.The MCD officials stated that the tax submission system automatically calculates the tax of the current as well as the last financial year together for the remaining taxpayers of the last financial year.
According to them, the hotel and restaurant owners are not willing to pay for the property tax for the year 2020-2021 right now as they claim that they have had negligible income so far due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Since the system does not issue the receipt for the property tax submission of the last financial year alone without the submission of the tax of the current year, the corporation provides a manual receipt to restaurant and hotel operators for the tax submission of the financial year 2019-2020. Moreover, the municipal tax superintendent Poonam Rawat informed that the MCD has collected the property tax of about Rs two crore since April.
She said that though most of the property tax is submitted directly in the Town Hall and about one-fourth of the said amount of the collected tax has been deposited online. According to Rawat, a large part of the property tax is collected from the commercial property owners. She said that the property tax of Rs 53 lakh was recently submitted by a private hospital in the city.
It is pertinent to mention here that the last date to submit the property tax with the rebate of 20 per cent for the taxpayers of the last financial year ended on July 31 and as informed by the municipal commissioner, Vinay Shankar Pandey, decision on the extension on the rebate will be announced after three-day holidays.
