The phenomenon of Urban Immovable Property Tax (UIPT) regime is continuously evolving in developing countries and is essential for sustainable metropolitan well-being. This precedent in Pakistan was set by Excise, Taxation & Narcotics Control Department, Government of Punjab in consultation with the Urban Unit, a subsidiary organization of Government of Punjab. The main objective was to update manual records of Urban Immovable Property Tax (UIPT) towards robust and state of the art Management Information System integrating with Geographical Information System (GIS) based monitoring dashboard for all the districts of Punjab.
Total number of property units and the gross demand increased due to GIS based survey, standardized assessments and revised valuation table introduced as on 01-08-2014. Since then, the Urban Unit is engaged with the department under a separate Service Level Agreement (SLA) as technical arm for continuous support and services and to keep the UIPT operations smooth. This success resulted in the following benefits: - 24/7 availability of the system - Strong monitoring & evaluation mechanism - Increased efficiency and effectiveness of the work done - Removal of trust deficit in public (taxpayers) - Increased reliability by transparency - Enriched decision support system (DSS) - Integration for easy tax payments (Epay) - Various public facilitation provisions hosted on official website of the department - Centralized operations and reduced workload by single click process
The Economic Reform Unit, Finance Department under Tax reform component of World Bank loan, also hired the services of Urban Unit as consulting firm in Pakistan to support the Government of Sindh Tax Reform Plan.
For this purpose, Sindh Public Sector Management Reform Project (SPSMRP) was rolled out with an objective to strengthen Public Sector Performance through improved revenue generation and expenditure management of Urban Immovable Properties inter alia.
The project entails Android based GIS integrated survey of Property Tax and Professional Tax in Sukkur district Sindh, for eventual scale upto the entire province.
Client: Excise, Taxation and Narcotics Control Department, Sindh
In order to ensure revenue enhancement of UIPT, an initiative was taken by ET&NCD, Government of KPK in upgrading its UIPT system through digitization and computerization of the existing system and integrating GIS based MIS monitoring dashboard for total property units in Abbottabad, Nowshera and Mardan. The same model will be scaled-up throughout KPK. The lessons learnt from UIPT Punjab and Sukkur are applied to improve the overall methodology.
Some efforts to improve UIPT in KPK were made in past by different vendors, but unfortunately, those could not bear desired results due to incomplete requirement specifications, poor system designing and weak coordination amongst the persons having domain knowledge and system developers.
In order to improve the current UIPT system in KPK, it was necessary to focus initially on the administrative side to bring awareness on all issues in UIPT and design a modern well-administered tax system to incorporate all previous gaps. For this purpose, a GIS based physical survey was required that will update the current records and provide MIS based business solution to the Department with their work methodology ensuring credibility and reliability of system which will further be upscaled across KPK.
Client: Excise, Taxation and Narcotics Control Department, Peshawar
Baluchistan is the largest province in Pakistan in terms of area, covering 347,190 km2 with mostly barren land. However, it is the smallest in population with majority residing as scattered settlements and few major cities namely as Quetta, Sibbi, Gwader, Khuzdar, Turbat. Keeping in view this scenario of urbanization, it has a huge potential as well as an urgent need for maintenance and updating of its Urban Immovable Property Tax (UIPT) system.
The Urban Unit has ample knowledge and expertise in UIPT computerization and digitization of the property tax regime. This is helping ET&NCD, Government of Baluchistan in updating its manual UIPT records through GIS integrated MIS providing one link of all the urban properties.
Initially, a pilot project in Quetta will help set a model for the rest of Baluchistan.
Client: Excise, Taxation and Narcotics Control Department, Quetta
