The state government has finally given permission to Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation to collect professional tax within the city limits. This will give a major boost to the revenues of the civic body. The job was being done by the Commercial Taxes Department till now. The GHMC hopes to raise over Rs 300 crore by way of professional tax. The officials of the civic body have been claiming that the Commercial Taxes Department wasn’t making any serious efforts to collect professional tax, and was also not remitting 95 per cent of the tax collections to the civic body. As a result, the GHMC was getting only Rs 50 crore or so as its share every year.
“We (GHMC) are better placed to collect professional tax, as we have a trained network to collect taxes in the form of property tax bill collectors and inspectors, to name a few. A large number of doctors, engineers, architects, chartered accountants and lawyers, among others, in the city are not paying professional tax, causing a loss of crores of rupees to the GHMC. Now, the government order will enable us to improve professional tax collections,” said a senior official in the GHMC. The Commercial Taxes Department has been collecting an average of Rs 180 crore every year, while the GHMC tax wing officials had been maintaining that this can be increased to over Rs 300 crore by bringing all professionals under the professional tax net.
Though the Chief Minister, Mr N. Kiran Kumar Reddy, had in principle agreed to transfer professional tax collection authority to GHMC from the Commercial Taxes Department in August 2011, the orders for this were issued only in August 2012, after a period of one year. The state government issued G.O. Ms No. 498 on Friday (August 3, 2012) appointing the GHMC commissioner as the authority to collect tax in the city limits.
Likewise, municipal commissioners of Vijayawada and Greater Visakhapatnam were also empowered to collect professional taxes. An advantage of this government order is that the GHMC will now get its due share of 95 per cent of the total professional tax collections from the city.