Special Assessments Portal for the Taxing Agencies

About the Program

Category: Financial Management (Best in Category)

Year: 2018

Alameda County collects $3.5 billion in annual property tax revenue, including $600 million collected on behalf of 57 local taxing entities as special assessments that are included on the property tax bills. Until 2017, taxing entities sent their special assessments data to the County via email or CD. This manual process was tracked in a spreadsheet and required major effort to administer the upload, validation and correction of six million records every year. Property tax bills are generated on the mainframe, so upload and validation of the data involved multiple rounds of re-runs should data errors be discovered. Certification of the results required staff to examine paper reports generated during the upload. Overall process took two months to complete. In 2016, the Information Technology Department (ITD) was asked to automate the process. In three months, the project team developed a working prototype to parallel test the new upload/validation engine. In August 2017, the new portal went live allowing taxing entities to upload, validate and correct data in real-time. The portal reduced the production cycle from nearly two months to 10 days, saved the County 30 man-days annually and earned praise from customers: “Easily the best system … I’ve come across”.