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The head of the Yakkaterak mahalla in Qiziriq district, Surxondaryo region, has gone public with a striking complaint: he and fellow neighbourhood chiefs are being called to the district centre every single day to answer for the unpaid tax debts of residents they have no legal power to compel.
In a video address to his community, Akrom Misirov described the daily summons as exhausting and, in his telling, legally questionable. “We are forced to go to the district centre morning and evening every day because of residents in our mahalla who have not paid their taxes,” he said. The pressure has become so routine that he is required to arrive at the district administration building as early as 06:30 each morning.
What makes the situation particularly striking, Misirov said, is that some of the outstanding debts are trivial in size — as little as 100,000 or 200,000 soums. Even those negligible arrears, he noted, are enough to trigger the daily accountability ritual for neighbourhood leaders. “The most painful thing is that some of them still owe just 100,000 or 200,000 soums,” he said.
Forced Leases as a Last Resort
Misirov also alluded to a coercive enforcement mechanism available under the process: the compulsory transfer of a debtor’s property to forced lease. He described the threat of that measure as something he is actively trying to prevent, and said the effort to head it off is itself a source of daily strain. “We are struggling to avoid having to stamp documents and send people into forced lease — that is what is wearing people down,” he said.
He added that he has no remaining options: from the following day, he said, he would be obliged to submit to the relevant tax department the names of all residents whose debts exceed one million soums. “We have no choice now — we will report everyone with debts above one million soums to the department. There is simply no other way,” Misirov said.
A Question of Legal Basis
The episode raises a pointed question about the boundaries of institutional responsibility. Tax assessment and collection are the statutory functions of the authorised tax authorities, not of mahalla councils, which are community self-governance bodies. Whether there is a legal basis for summoning mahalla chiefs daily and holding them accountable for individual residents’ tax compliance is a question the relevant authorities have not publicly addressed.
Misirov’s appeal makes plain that the practice, whatever its legal standing, is already well established in Qiziriq district. “Frankly, we are tired of being lectured every day,” he said. His public statement is an unusually candid signal of the pressure being channelled downward through local governance structures onto neighbourhood leaders who lack the enforcement tools to resolve the problem they are being held responsible for.