The Andhra Pradesh state government has given permission to Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) to take charge of collecting professional tax within the city limits.
According to the sources, till now, the collection of professional tax was being done by the Commercial Taxes Department. But as per the new orders, GHMC will take that responsibility and this new change is expected to bring more revenues to the civic body.
The civic body has been claiming that the commercial tax department is not making proper efforts to collect the tax and was also not paying 95% of the taxes to GHMC, which is its official share. As a result, the civic body was receiving only RS 50 crore as its share every year.
GHMC already has a trained network of bill collectors and inspectors who collect property tax, hence, they are sure of making a better progress in the tax collection than the commercial tax department. As they noted that a large group of professionals like doctors, engineers, architects, chartered accountants and lawyers, from the city are not paying the taxes and are causing a loss of crores of rupees to the GHMC, they want to take this issue seriously.
As per the official records if all the professionals in the city are brought under the tax net, the net income would be around Rs 300 crore per year, of which the commercial tax department used to collect only 180 crore on an average per year, said the officials.
Source: DC