This article is from Cal-Tax Digest, published
by the California Taxpayers' Association.
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While most information technology shops have spent the last few years working to make their operations Y2K compliant, others have discovered that the best overall solution may be to replace, rather than remediate. Such was our case in Ventura County, where we faced not only the Y2K problem, but the added challenge of how to cost-effectively update our two-decades-old unsecured property tax system.

Using Model 204 database software from Computer Corporation of America (CCA), we were able to achieve Y2K compliance and replace our aged tax system with something functionally superior for a total cost only slightly higher than the cost of Y2K remediation alone.

With the help of CCA's consulting team, here's how we did it:

Tax System Background
The unsecured tax system is crucial to the financial well-being of the county. Unsecured property includes marine vessels, aircraft, personal property owned or leased by a business, possessory interest (any taxable activity taking place on a non-taxable property) and improvements on land owned by others. Unsecured property tax can also include taxes on secured property for which the prior owners were not billed at the time they owned the secured property.

The system is maintained by three county agencies: assessor, auditor and tax collector. These agencies are responsible for the assessment of property values, application of established tax rates and exemptions to those values, computation of a tax charge, billing, mailing, collection of the taxes and distribution of the collections to the taxing agencies.

Heading Off Y2K
In late 1997, the county's information technology group analyzed the 20-year-old Cobol VSAM Assembler-based unsecured property tax system for possible exposure to Y2K. They found plenty of evidence of Y2K problems, but as they audited the capabilities of the system, they also concluded that the existing system automated only a fraction of all the processes carried out by the tax groups. Paper-based processes still existed across all three agencies, particularly in the assessor group, and they were neither as efficient nor as accurate as we would have liked.

If, for instance, the auditor did not understand some of the information received from the assessor's office, the data had to be returned for clarification, and the requested information was researched from paper records. This caused the county to spend more time than it wanted to complete tasks and to correct errors that crept into the system. Batch processing techniques, common when the system was developed 20 years ago, also ruled out on-line updates or corrections. But one of the biggest ongoing problems was the fact that the county could only gain access to on-line records from the current year. Frequent inquiries into previous years' data required administrators to sift through paper records.

The county decided to proceed with a whole new system. It realized it could model the new system on an existing Model 204-based Ventura County secured tax system. This approach was appealing because the county already based two of its seven tax systems on Model 204, and staff members were comfortable using it. The new system would also allow us to eliminate complicated transfers of data between departments and give administrators immediate access to all updated information for current and past years.

 
Mike Reed is Project Manager for the Ventura County Unsecured Tax System Development Project.

Editor's Note: There are news reports of those who have been wringing their hands over the approach of the new century, and what the year 2000 will do to computer programs that did not include four-digit dates. However, here is a classic example of how a county, with help from the private sector, can react to a problem as an opportunity to be innovative, with efficiencies that benefit taxpayers.

In November 1997, the county outlined the scope of the job. We composed a document showing that the county could develop the system for somewhat more than we had already budgeted for Y2K alone. The document was used to help obtain approval from the assessor, auditor and tax collector agencies to develop the new system.

The next step was to determine who would build the system, and we already knew that the county's in-house personnel were heavily committed to running existing systems. Moreover, there was very limited Model 204 coding talent to draw from in our area. So we contacted CCA's Consulting Group, the largest and best source of available, qualified Model 204 experts. They were prepared with the integration and technology options from which we could chose to build and test the new system. They came on board in January 1998, as we entered the evaluation and design phase.

Integrated and On-line
We wanted the new system to do everything the old system couldn't, so we asked each of the three agencies to describe its processes for handling data. This exercise helped the development team identify what should be built into the new system to make it more efficient. Staff in the Assessor's Office, for instance, determined they could streamline an existing multi-step procedure down to just three steps. With CCA's help, we began to automate all the manual processes that had slowed down our ability to manage data efficiently over the years. The actual programming work was completed wherever it could be performed most efficiently. Some CCA consultants collaborated with the tax group's information technology staff at county offices, while others remained at CCA headquarters in Framingham, Massachusetts, where they could take advantage of day-to-day interactions with the CCA research and development teams. This allowed them to obtain and apply the latest coding techniques to the project.

CCA's consultants carried out major preliminary planning for all parts of the new system. The plan specified an integrated on-line, real-time update and inquiry facility and added higher levels of security than the secured tax system upon which it was modeled. The Model 204-based system automates the all-important Assessor Roll Corrections (ARC) inquiries for all three customers through all stages in the process. This would enable the county to achieve much higher overall levels of efficiency. We used a phased implementation, concentrating on delivery of the modules in the order they were needed.

The new Possessory Interest module was implemented in November of 1998 and the Business Property System module followed in January 1999. The Assessor's Office quickly realized productivity gains from these new modules. The previously mentioned Assessor's ARC portion of the system was brought on line a month later. The Auditor and Tax Collector's on-line and supporting nightly reporting modules were implemented shortly after.

The improved interface, visibility of transactions in process, ease of use, enhanced reporting and additional functionality all contributed to the three agencies' ability to accurately and efficiently use the new unsecured property roll.

A More Efficient System
The new system offers county tax administrators better visibility into prior year secured charges and permits more timely and accurate access to data. It also delivers the real-time updates and applications of changes that were missing from the original application. Yearly housekeeping and maintenance items that did not come into play until the end of the fiscal year June 30 were completed in the spring of 1999.

While the improvement in the administration of the county's tax system has been most visible to those of us working in the midst of it, the greatest beneficiaries of the system are clearly the taxpayers, who can now obtain information more accurately and more quickly than before. By teaming our own group with outside consultants, we were able to deliver this new system to taxpayers in a cost-effective manner. We've taken care of the Y2K problems and replaced the old system, and we've done it all for slightly more than the budget we'd established for Y2K repairs alone.