The Roles of Establishing Real Property Registration System for Municipal Property Taxation in the Case of Dire Dawa, Ethioipa

Abstract

Property taxation is one of the means to generate revenue by government for the local developments. To improve the property taxation government needs to ensure that its property records contain information that is beneficial to collect property taxation. Introducing a real property registration system that has complete contents and mechanisms to regular updating is the most important tool to support the property taxation system. With regard to this, many authors have discussed about the practice of the real property registration system in general, but not enough researches have been carried out to the role of establishing a real property registeration for municipal property taxation. The objective of this study is to describe the importance of introducing a real property registration system for property taxation system improvements. Mixed research approach has been used to collect and analyses data. Field activities including questionnaires, interviews and direct observation were undertaken in order to get information on the current situation of the property tax system and land registrations. Based on the analysis, the need for the property taxation in the study area, the gaps in the information provided by the current land register were identified. The results showed that the establishment of a real property registration system facilitated the property taxation process and consequently maximize property based revenue. There is a direct strong relationship between real property registration system and improvements in property taxation. The study recommended that the current registration system should be remodeled to include the vital information such as property value, owners address and tax amount that is desired to collect property taxation. Comprehensive real property policies, cost effective systematic registration and computerizing the records were suggested to improve the current deficiency of land register.