COLLECTING outstanding town rates remains a persistent challenge for the Labasa Town Council, despite maintaining strong overall collection levels.
This was highlighted by Minister for Local Government and Housing, Maciu Nalumisa who said the issue was not unique to Labasa but being experienced across municipalities in Fiji.
Speaking during discussions on the Labasa Town Council 2018 Annual Report, Mr Nalumisa acknowledged that while current rate collection efficiency remained high, the recovery of arrears continued to pose difficulties.
“Of course, one thing that is positive about this report in terms of rate collection is that the current collection is very efficient,” he said.
“It hovers around 80 per cent, but the only challenge is trying to recover the outstanding town rates.”
Mr Nalumisa said the council had, in recent years, introduced ratepayer profiling as a strategy to better understand those in arrears and the different categories of rates owed. He explained that this approach was aimed at developing more practical and targeted methods to improve recovery.
“This is to try and recover arrears from ratepayers, an issue that happens across all municipalities.”
In addition to profiling, Mr Nalumisa said, changes had been made to the way interest was applied to overdue rates in an effort to ease the burden on ratepayers and encourage repayment.
“However, one thing that we have done is we amended the interest methodology, especially interest on arrears from a compound interest rate to a simple interest rate.
“We have also reduced the interest rate from 11 percent to 5 per cent.
“In a way, it also helps some of the ratepayers coming on board in paying the rate arrears that have been there for quite some time.”
Mr Nalumisa said the combined measures were intended to improve compliance and gradually reduce the level of outstanding rates.
