LAHORE - The Punjab government will cut role of the district treasury, revenue staff and middle men by developing data exchange among land records, registration deeds and commercial banks.
The step will be taken in coordination with the Punjab Information Technology Board that has been working on e-governance initiative.
Official sources told that the newly posted Senior Member Board of Revenue Capt (r) Zahid Saeed advised the concerned quarters and the PITB to speed up process in this regard.
“The SMBR is of the view that after streamlining the e-stamping the government revenue can be multiplied,” said an officer conditioning anonymity.
“Capt (r) Saeed thinks the need was to check leakage on district treasury to boost revenue collection,” said the officer adding that is why the senior member conducted meetings with the PITB officials as well as the concerned section after resuming top revenue office.
The BOR will soon move a file to the chief secretary Punjab as the senior member has directed.
“The SMBR wants to increase Punjab revenue on different heads like Capital Value Tax, Registration Fees and Mutation Fees besides stamp duty and district treasury is considered to be a great hurdle in this regard,” the officer said.
The SMBR noticed in some cases where the revenue staff including Patwaris, Tehsildars and even Assistant Commissioners caused big loss to the exchequer.
He said that the land computerisation has already made tamperproof property records that would benefit the current move.
“Besides cutting short the role of middle men, the mutation system will be simplified to reduce litigation and increase surety,” the official maintained.
The BOR that deals with the maintaining and updating revenue records, mutations, mortgage, revenue collection, consolidation of holdings etc and the common man is directly concerned with this department.
The revenue staff has ample opportunities to manipulate the common public at large. Now, BOR wants developing integration between land mutation and computerization of land records to avoid manual mutation, the malafide role of the revenue staff would be curtailed that was a major beneficiary.
The major losers for non-exchange of data among land reecords, registration of deeds and banks were the public and the national exchequer. “In a land mutation case worth Rs 90m only Rs 600 were deposited in the kitty” thanks to the revenue staff hand.
Moreover, in a manual system a lot of mutations remained pending for one reason or the other giving birth to frauds.
As per PITB source there is no process for verification of stamp paper being genuine or fake. In addition to being time consuming, other issues involved in manual system were security flaws and revenue leakage due to under valuation of the transactional costs and fake stamp papers.
There are two types of stamp papers judicial and non-judicial and the later stamp papers worth Rs 1,000 or more are referred to as high-value stamp papers and are only issued by the Treasury Offices of the district.
Over 95 per cent of revenue under stamp duty is collected from these high value Non-Judicial stamp papers. The system if implemented will also provide the access to Finance Department besides BOR for maintaining accounts.