Completion of the rigorous two-year installation, testing, and software implementation process was heralded by Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector Paul Bettencourt, who urges taxpayers to "get online instead of in line" to pay their property tax bills. The phrase is the tax office's cyber-motto and is emblematic of the Bettencourt administration's drive to modernize the tax office through technology to enhance efficiency and provide great customer service to taxpayers -- a concept Bettencourt calls "Smart Government."
Harris County, the third most populous county in the United States, has more than 1.2 million real property tax parcels within its borders. The HCTO collects for more than 50 taxing jurisdictions within the county. According to ACT Project Manager Erin Wesling, HCTO's extraordinary size added significantly to the challenge of this information technology upgrade and drove program enhancements specific to clients with large data volumes and many end users. One hundred and fifty HCTO employees utilize ACT daily, as do third-party associates who access the system on a limited basis.
Before going into operation, a five-year history of each Harris County tax account was loaded into ACT, giving individual taxpayers a record of property tax increases and decreases for all entities. In addition to receiving a tax history printout in their 2005 property tax bills, taxpayers can also view these histories, and pay their tax bills, online at the Tax Office's Web site or by phone via the HCTO's interactive voice response feature. Also loaded into the system were delinquent tax accounts, some with outstanding balances dating back over 20 years.
A joint HCTO/ACT team completed a full system implementation lifecycle of two years before "going live" with the new program on September 19, 2005. The Harris County implementation team tested 216 business processes on the system before 1,356,000 property tax bills were generated by ACT in November 2005.
HCTO gained advantages by fully automating their tax office operation. Tax office staff now have access to more detailed, real-time transactional data, which allows for faster responses to questions from businesses. Enhanced reporting capabilities speed up many formerly labor-intensive processes such as month-end closings and disbursement of funds to jurisdictions, leaving tax office staff more time for analytical activities.
The complexity of HCTO operations presents special challenges associated with high-volume data processing. The ACT system automates tax billings, returned mail, volume payments, lock box and mortgage company payments, and partial payments. The software also manages all penalty and interest calculations, refunds, and special exemptions. ACT's Special Inventory Module, which went live at HCTO in 2003, handles special inventory taxes, such as those paid by car dealerships. Taxes collected in this module are held in escrow during the current tax year, and are transferred automatically to the ACT system at the end of each year.
