E-stamping is the new legal document in Punjab, PITB says

In an effort to revolutionize the life of a common man in Punjab, PITB (Punjab Information Technology Board) has come up with another innovatory product, E-Stamping or more simply said, electronic stamp paper, in order to eliminate corruption, fraud, forgery and waste of time at the time of entering into either a commercial deal. As a part of routine practice, non-judicial stamp paper are used on documents which are about transfer of property, commercial and financial agreements etc. Such stamp papers of worth Rs. 1000 or more are considered as high value legal document and are only issued by treasury office of the district. Under this new system, a person would be able to get the desired stamp paper in just 30 minutes unlike the old system in which minimum four days were required to get hold of a high value stamp paper which usually started with citizen approaching the treasury office, going through bank verification for the payment, fee collection at State Bank or National Bank and then back to treasury office for the collection of stamp paper. In many cases, an agent or property dealer would intervene with a promise to get rid of this cumbersome exercise from the life of buyer against an additional fee of his own. “In most of these cases the unaware buyer ends up with having a forged stamp paper who only comes to know about it years after, at the time of some verification, commented a PITB official. “Not only this fraud makes the life of the victim difficult but also the government is deprived of the revenue”, the official added further. Out of total revenue from the stamp duty, 89.8% percent of the revenue comes from the non-judicial stamp papers. Only in the month of July 2014, Rs. 742 million worth of stamp duty was collected that was originated from 35,395 property transactions. Normally, 3% of the total transaction value is the stamp duty. Whereas, e-stamping would only require an internet connection to know the duty structure on a certain value, a visit to nearest designated bank from where customer would be able to collect the stamp paper after undergoing a NADRA based verification process and submitting challan 32 in just half an hour. PITB promises that e-stamping would not only eliminate the middle man and hassle of getting involved into manual process but with the help of this automated and crystal clear process it foresees a 100% increase in the stamp duty revenue for the government which currently stands at Rs. 20 billion a year.