Colleen Dardagan
colleen.dardagan@inl.co.za
Amending the Municipal Property Rates Act to exempt certain public buildings from property rates is the government’s first move to sort out the country’s municipal billing system tangle.
The Mercury reported yesterday that the government was hiring private contractors to unscramble several years of municipal bills for rates and services on buildings owned by the Public Works Department. The work will include verifying invoices from municipalities, checking to see whether payments have been made, reconciling charges with payments, calculating interest payments, checking for over-charging and separating rates charges from service charges.
Lennox Mabaso, spokes-man for the KZN Co-operative Government Department, said the government had acknowledged that the municipal billing system across the country was in a shambles.
“The Co-operative Governance Department has already published proposed amendments to the Municipal Pro-perty Rates Act,” he said. “The changes are out for public comment. We are waiting for those. We are looking for other interventions (from the public) in this process so that the billing system can be cleaned up.”
Mabaso said the proposed amendments could affect clinics, schools and public service buildings.
“Rating a clinic or a school, where services are being rendered free of charge to the public, does not make sense. The amendments to the bill are saying that certain public entities should be exempted from rates or billed differently.”
He said KZN municipalities were not necessarily owed more money than other municipalities.
“The eThekwini municipality is also not without its challenges, but it is less erratic in its billing system by far.”
Municipal manager Mi-chael Sutcliffe said rates owed on government buildings in the eThekwini region were up to date.
Improvement
Mabaso said KZN municipalities had improved on achieving clean audits. Now the department was looking to improve their billing systems.
KZN Public Works Department spokeswoman Sureshinee Govender said the de- partment had paid the KZN municipalities more than R400 million in rates this year, and she believed that that was the amount owed. However, they had approached the Co-operative Governance Department to verify that the amount was correct.
She acknowledged that there were some disputes, which were being addressed.
If the amendments to the Municipal Property Rates Act came into effect, the department would not be affected because the national Treasury paid the bills of schools and clinics, said Govender.
