BMC seeks IIT help to revamp tax software

“We have approached IIT to help us in identifying the lacunae in our current IT systems and to advise us on how to implement the computerised capital value system for property tax,” said S B Hatkar,assessor and collector,BMC’s tax department.

The BMC is finally ready with the tax bills for a major chunk of properties in the city as per the new capital value based system and is awaiting the Standing Committee’s nod for sending the bills. The Tax Department is also planning to send its officials for comprehensive computer training to handle the new property tax system.

Currently,the BMC does not have any computer engineer in its IT department and has outsourced assignments to private firms. The civic administration completed implementing the SAP ERP system across its departments last year. “This means that every department needs to have expert advise on the software to handle their specific departments,but in practice,we have to consult officials from the private companies who help us understand the system,” said an official.

The civic body has made a provision of 166.86 crore for IT,which includes Rs 93.57 crore for revenue expenditure and Rs 73.29 crore for capital expenditure,for the year 2011-2012.

According to Hatkar,the BMC will also be consulting the IIT experts for the current softwares which the department uses for its internal work.

While the managing of the current software of the Tax Department is outsourced to a private company,officials admit that routine errors in the maintenance is proving difficult to handle everyday work.

According to a senior official,“The software systems in the department are not very well maintained which lead to constant errors in data collection. For example,the data collected for property tax defaulters was full of errors this time and we had to send it back for correction. Also,every time we have to access data from the internal system,we need to send in a request to the company which maintains our software. This delays our routine work.”

“The IIT experts will be able to point out the lacunae in our systems and help us function better,” said Hatkar.