The Western Area Rural District Council (WARDC) has outsourced the collection of property rates on behalf of the Rural Mountain Area to PEC Sierra Leone using a customised cadastral software system.
During the launch of the Integrated Cadastral Management System on Thursday, the Chief Administrator of WARDC, Ahmed Shekuba Koroma said “this system will give credence to 100% compliance in property tax collection and payment and this places PEC in the position to take a lead in the business of property rate collection,”
PEC Sierra Leone Limited was established in 2014 by PEC Africa and local stakeholders to share industry intellect developed by the PEC brand.
Since their inception in the country, PEC has initiated a prepared revenue collection service for selected electricity consumers based on automated metering infrastructure. PEC has also launched, implemented and supported a cadastral project for all the 19 councils in the country.
According to Koroma, they decided to contract PEC in respect of property rate collection because the ultimate concern of the Council is to attract funds to enhance effective service delivery in its localities. He added that they are mandated by the Local Government Act to collect their own revenue but that they were faced with lots of challenges in the collection of such revenue including too many illegal hands in the collection of revenue, the lack of a standard cadastral system to give a clear view of the status of properties and the staff members assigned to collect revenue tend to side with people in the communities or property owners.
The CA said because of these challenges, they decided to outsource the tax collection and that the contract was awarded after the procurement and evaluation processes and eventually PEC Sierra Leone was awarded the contract in July 2015.
Ahmed Shekuba Koroma maintained that the collection method of PEC will promote the alignment of rates to utilities; precisely water and electricity facilities.
“But as a council, we are of the view that that PEC approach can further be corroborated by home-brewed strategic thinking denials to access to other public services when you fail to pay you property tax,” he maintained.
He disclosed that when the cadastral would have developed they had agreed that they will introduce a flat rate system for all properties as a recovery measure for all properties. He added that with the measurement, PEC has discovered 15, 000 (fifteen thousand) properties from Rokel to Hill Station since these are their area of operation.
The CEO of PEC Sierra Leone, Malador Sowe said they will use GPS to assess values of properties which will automatically be captured in a central system at council. He indicated that the assessment of properties, which is going to be a continuous process, will provide simultaneous updated information that would be captured in the council’s cadastral system and in the consolidated data repository.
He said the comprehensive local government collection will minimise subjectivity in the assessment of properties, enhance 100% compliance at no additional costs to councils and there will be reduction in collection of cost if payments are linked to contract revenue system.
In his keynote address, the Deputy Minister of Local Government, Adiru Kaloko said the cadastral management system is a vital strategy in strengthening the local revenue generation capacities of the local councils.
He explained some major challenge confronting decentralisation including the weak capacities across the Local Councils to adequately mobilize local revenue to complement revenue from other sources to meet the cost of running their operations.
He pointed out that the Ministries of Local Government and Finance are going to ensure that they harmonise systems in all the 19 councils to ensure equitable, efficient and able-to-generate expected revenues needed to improve service delivery
By Betty Milton
Friday November 11, 2016
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