Hot air over property tax

Finance Minister Colm Imbert, at the release of the National Financial Inclusion Survey Report in August called for an accelerated transition to a cashless society.

The Finance Ministry, Mr Imbert said, was working with the Ministry of Trade and Industry to support the development and promotion of e-payment channels within the state, emphasising e-money and cashless transactions.

Mr Imbert was speaking with knowledge of the report, which revealed that 63 per cent of all transactions are conducted using cash. While debit card use has been increasing, credit card use has flatlined at 15 per cent of the banking population.

It's a pity that Mr Imbert's fervour for cashless transactions and online access didn't take hold during the planning sessions to launch the property tax collection system.

Digital transformation has been conspicuously absent from any aspect of its implementation.

After the bill's passage in March, Mr Imbert claimed that the assessment process was automated to the tune of as many as 15,000 assessments being issued each day.

But those assessments crawled through the mail system until the government decided to cut the property tax for residential properties from three per cent to two per cent.

So the new assessments again made their torturous way through the mail. The deadline for payment is a fortnight away, and property owners are complaining that they haven't received the revised assessments. Some haven't even received the first assessment.

More points of annoyance included the lack of any system to support payment by bank cards at the launch of the collection drive and the continued absence of any online option for payment, yet there is an e-tax online filing system that's been in use for almost a decade.

TTEC and WASA are state utilities that have enabled online payment of their bills for more than ten years, seeking to reduce customer friction in settling their arrears.

Such 21st-century thinking doesn't seem to have influenced planning for property tax collection — the controversial resumption of a tax regime that's been resisted by the public, and used as a political football for years.

It can't be possible that in the rollout of the tax collection system, the government overlooked the challenges accompanying its implementation.

However, there has been no structured effort to allow homeowners to view their assessments online, spotty implementation of bank card payment systems at the Inland Revenue Division, and no implementation schedule for an online payment system.

Instead, it's bureaucratic business as usual. Line up and wait. Maybe we'll get to you today.

It's one thing for government ministers to talk about a cashless society and improving service delivery. It's quite another when the rubber hits the road and all those words are revealed to be just hot air.