Over a lakh house-owners across 12 wards in south Calcutta are facing the repercussions of the multi-crore scam at the Calcutta Municipal Corporation?s (CMC) Gariahat office.

Neither the revenue department nor the assessment department at the office is processing their files. They are demanding a written order from higher officials to ignore the records currently displayed by the computers.

Result: work on mutation, correction of civic records and adjustment of tax paid has come to a standstill.

The employees are shirking the responsibility of processing work on the basis of the documents being produced by the tax-payers.

House-owners, whose property tax-payment entries had been deleted from the computer system, are now not getting the clearance certificate from the assessment department despite being armed with genuine payment receipts.

The areas affected by the no-work policy stretch from Tiljala-Topsia to Ganguly Bagan-Ramgarh. ?I will not correct the record until and unless I am directed in writing by the assessor collector or the deputy municipal commissioner (DMC) of revenue or the municipal commissioner,? said a clerk in the Gariahat office.

The assessor collector, in turn, makes it clear that he will not issue any such instruction unless the DMC (revenue) informs him in writing.

The DMC (revenue) said: ?I will convey the municipal commissioner?s instruction as soon as I get it.?

Amid this debate, house-owners are being denied the No Outstanding Certificate (NOC), both by the revenue department and the assessment department. An NOC from the latter is essential for mutation of a house or flat in the name of its present owner.

So far, the total amount of defalcation because of deletion of computer entries has crossed Rs 12 crore in the Gariahat treasury alone.

The computer entries of the revenue departments in other CMC offices, at Ramlal Bazar, Garia, Santoshpur and the head office are yet to be verified.

Arun Das, a peon in the assessment section, and Sirajul Haque, an official in the treasury department of the Gariahat office, were earlier arrested in connection with the scam. Seven more civic employees are on the police?s list of suspects.

Leader of the opposition in the CMC Javed Ahmed Khan, along with other Trinamul Congress leaders, addressed a press conference on Friday over the defalcation.

He alleged that municipal commissioner Debashis Som, who was hailed as a computer wizard by former mayor Subrata Mukherjee, is trying to hush up the case.

?Confusion is being created to pass the buck from the revenue department to the assessment department,? said Khan. ?We don?t believe that a peon and a petty computer operator had masterminded the scam,? said Trinamul chief whip Anup Chatterjee.