KOLKATA: Less than 5,000 of Kolkata Municipal Corporation 's 7.5-lakh property taxpayers have enrolled for the new Unit Area Assessment (UAA), three days ahead of the May 31 dead-line for the switch over.The dismal response has prompted the civic bosses to consider extending the changeover deadline by another month or two. At the same time, there is concern that stretching the extension indefinitely would affect the civic body's revenues. According to assessment department officials, the KMC Act, 1980 doesn't allow the civic body to realise property tax at old rates. The KMC thus needs to speed up the changeover process before it starts collecting tax under the new rates.A peek at the KMC help desks set up at the borough offices reveals that the task is less easy than said. Most of the taxpayers are unable to fill up the UAA forms on their own, giving correct inputs based on multiplicative factors needed to derive the "reasonable rent" of the property before calculating the tax under the new system. Even KMC men are not always in a position to answer their queries.But the first hurdle is the non-functional online application service that is preventing even enabled citizens from filling up the forms on their own. The infrastructure failure is leading to a rush in the borough offices where KMC employees have to field multiple queries.Assessment department officials working under pressure have on occasions wrongly sent bills of 2016-17 to citizens for the 2017-18 assessment year. Many citizens do not have an inkling of the 32 help desks across the city to guide them fill up the "self-assessment" forms.Taking note of the teething problems a month ago, mayor-in-council member Debabrata Majumdar paid visits to the help desks to identify and sort out the problem. On reason for the bottleneck could be that there is not enough trained personnel (KMC and outside) to help citizens calculate their own tax. In a bid to prevent the sudden fall in civic revenues, a section of KMC officials is advising citizens to pay the money according to old rates. The KMC will keep the money in suspense account and later adjust it with the new property tax (UAA) claim.But the KMC can't force citizens to take this route because the KMC Act doesn't allow two tax systems to coexist. "We need to amend the KMC Act in order to keep the two systems going. Else, we may face a legal problem. But we must keep the options open as our revenue generation will take a hit if the tax payers stop making payments and wait till the applications are accepted under UAA scheme," said a KMC assessment department official. However, this is no excuse for a civic body like the KMC when many corporations elsewhere in India — Delhi, Chandigarh, Hyderabad, Patna — have all switched to UAA. There is no reason why the KMC couldn't make it when the UAA Bill was passed in the West Bengal Assembly way back in 2006.

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