The surest way for Metropolitan, Municipal, and District assemblies (MMDAs) to generate revenue to augment its limited resources, with the possibility of being taken off the District Assembly Common Fund, is when they properly administer property rate, Peter Amewu, Lands and Natural Resources Minister has said.

The MMDAs mostly rely on the District Assembly Common Fund (DACF) as their major source of revenue.

The Minister of Lands and Natural Resources, Mr. Peter Amewu, was speaking at the launch of a new Electronic Property Mass Appraisal System for Rating Valuation in the country by the Land Valuation Division with support from a private an I. T solution company in Accra.

According to Mr. Amewu, the most sustainable source of revenue for any local authority all over the world is their internally generated funds (IGF).

"MMDAs require a lot of resources to provide the required municipal services to the citizenry and one of the reliable sources of IGF available to them when properly administered is property rate revenue.

The benefit for the country if this source of revenue at the local level is properly administered, with the possibility of some MMDAs being taken off the DACF, cannot be overemphasized.

It is against this background that Land Valuation Division of the Lands Commission is being equipped with the requisite tools to improve its rating valuation service delivery to the MMDAs," he added.

The Land Valuation Division of the Lands Commission, which is an agency under the Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources is the only body mandated under the Lands Commission Act to provide or appoint Valuers to provide all MMDAs with valuation list.

According to Mr. Amewu, the availability of a comprehensive and current valuation list, that is list of all properties with current values, as a basis for the determination of the level of property rate revenue, is fundamental to any property rating (tax) system.

However, he said since the inception of the Land Valuation Board, now Land Valuation Division in 1986, the Division has not been able to fully perform its mandate successfully, leaving most assemblies with valuation list of limited coverage and outdated values.

He said statistics have shown that the Land Valuation Division has not been able, over the years to meet its obligations. Out of the 216 MMDAs, he said only a few can be said to have valuation list that are current and comprehensive enough to yield meaningful property rate revenue

"Assemblies are therefore unable to generate enough revenue from this potentially viable source as only a few property owners bear the brunt of paying property rate for the majority of property owners,"he ssaid.

Current challenges

Mr. Amewu admitted that the Land Valuation Division has over the years faced several challenges which account for the current state of affairs.

He said the Land Valuation Division has not been able to keep pace with needs of the assemblies due to a number of factors which include inadequate human resource capacity to cover all 2016 assemblies.

The Land Valuation Division he said has only 41 district offices with very limited staff to cater for all the 216 assemblies, which requires a lot of field staff to collect property data for valuation.

The challenges, he said, also have to do with inadequate funding from government for the Land Valuation Division to execute its mandate and also engage the services of private Valuers to support its activities.

"The absence of appropriate modern technology to facilitate mass valuations and over reliance on outmoded manual procedures in field data collection methodology/ technique resulting in tedious and lengthy valuation procedures,"he said.