Recorder's Capture of Document's Titles

About the Program

Category: County Administration and Management (Best in Category)

Year: 2011

Three Arizona Revised Statutes charge the Maricopa County Recorder’s office with creating an index to locate recorded documents, create categories using document codes and collect recording fees derived from the documents title. There are no national or state standards for creating a document’s title. As a result, the Recorder’s Office created hundreds of indexing categories, unknowingly making research of recorded documents difficult. In addition, document codes affect the recording fees, resulting in different fees being assessed for similar captions. This caused great confusion to the County’s constituents and these inaccuracies were having an effect on staff performance. To solve these issues, the County broke down the selection of document codes related to document processing into four phases. The first phase involved reviewing the accuracy of the list containing over 300 document codes and decided to either: keep, eliminate, reassign, or add if necessary. The secondary phase involved linking document titles to a corresponding document code or codes. Phase three; develop question/answer sets to assist the county’s employees with identifying key components of a document that may require an additional code being assigned to the document. The final phase takes place at the point of recordation where the document title would be captured and automatically assigned the correct document codes.