State government to send letters to vehicle owners asking them to clear pending dues

 Those who don't comply can find their vehicle's registration locked for non-payment and will not be able to ply on roads

Kinsuk Basu, TT, Calcutta, 07.06.24 : The state government has decided to send letters to individual vehicle owners asking them to clear their pending dues and taxes.

All regional transport offices under the transport department have been asked to prepare a list of tax defaulters and send out letters to the vehicle owners, officials in the department said.

The trigger: the state government wants to explore all possible avenues to improve revenue collection, and transport is among the departments tapped.

Letters to the defaulters would be sent by post and the process would begin soon, officials said.

The letters will specify a time limit within which the dues should be cleared. Those who don't comply can find their vehicle's registration locked for non-payment and will not be able to ply on the roads, officials said.

"The regional transport officials have been tasked with the job of shortlisting tax defaulters from the list of registered vehicle owners under their respective jurisdictions," a transport department official said.

"The data would be culled from the Vahan software that has the names of all registered vehicle owners and an update of their taxes either paid or pending to date."

The list would include those with their dues pending for the last two years and extend to those who have not paid the taxes for over a decade. While the tax component for commercial vehicles includes permit fees and certificate of fitness, individual car owners have to pay road tax, depending on the time frame they have opted, between five years and a lifetime.

Officials said they have observed that many individual car owners are oblivious to the deadline for paying road tax. By the time they realise, the payable amount becomes so big that many choose to sit on it before disposing of the old vehicles.

"The road tax component for individual car owners is 5.5 per cent of the recorded base value of the vehicle. A year's delay invites another 5.5 per cent as penalty. Over a few years, this figure can snowball into a significant amount," the official said.

Transport department officials at the regional transport offices have observed that several cars that are over a dozen years old are no longer in use and their owners are not keen on clearing the pending road tax dues.

Some of them have said they want to either scrap the vehicle or replace it with a new one.

The state government has decided that such owners would be asked to pay up irrespective of whether they are using the vehicles or not.

"It is the government's revenue and the owners are liable to clear the dues of the state government as law-abiding citizens," the official said.

Between January and March this year, the transport department had undertaken a similar exercise when letters were sent to 39,600 owners asking them to clear their pending taxes. Officials said they collected over Rs 150 crores from the drive.