Name Indexing Progress

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2021

The Maricopa County Recorder’s Office serves the public of the United States’ fourth most populous county, with over 4 million residents and spanning a geographic area of 9,222 square miles. Our Office records all instruments authorized or required by law to be recorded. For more than 13 years, the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office has consistently recorded more than 1 million documents per year, reaching a record 1.9 million documents in 2020. Maricopa County has seen tremendous growth in recent years. On average, our office handles over 6,000 documents to be recorded each day, and over 100,000 documents monthly, with all indicators signaling continued growth. Maricopa County is required by law to index the grantee and grantor names for each recorded document, which strained our resources as the number of documents being recorded increased. The Office recognized an opportunity to improve accuracy and customer experience by moving the indexing process in-house rather than with an offshore vendor. Recording Services and Information Technology experts in the Recorder’s Office successfully developed software using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools to repatriate and improve efficiency of the data entry process.