Property tax system takes flight

From the September 2004 issue of CountyLines

By Rebecca Troutman
Director of Research and Public Technology

The goal of delivering a state-of-the-art property tax system to benefit local governments in the state is becoming a reality. Five counties have now deployed key modules of the NCACC Collaborative Property Tax System (NCPTS).

With multiple counties involved, the Association has organized the NCPTS Software Steering Committee to oversee program maintenance, future deployments and functional enhancements. Henderson County Tax Assessor Stan Duncan was named committee chair, and each NCACC affiliate and participating county has a committee representative. The steering committee is monitoring progress on the final modules, CAMA (Computer Assisted Mass Appraisal) and Land Records, which are scheduled to be completed in December 2004.

NCPTS was originally designed and funded by Wake County, which deployed the Personal Property and Billing modules in 1999, followed by the Collections and Motor Vehicles modules in March 2003. NCACC partnered with Wake County and Intelligent Information Systems (IIS), the developer and support provider, to offer NCPTS to other interested local governments in North Carolina.

Wayne County participated in a pilot project to assess the software’s ability to meet other counties’ needs. Wayne then became the second organization to deploy the system in October 2003. The Wayne County Tax Department played a key role in defining and testing new features that were added to further enhance the system’s effectiveness for N.C. counties.

“This has been the most successful conversion project that I have ever participated in,” said Keith Goff, Information Technology Analyst for Wayne County. “We had the right resources and expertise to solve any issues that came up.”

Henderson County decided to deploy the system in September 2003 and set an aggressive schedule to be in production by January 2004. Henderson’s goal was to improve reporting capabilities, ensure data reliability and take advantage of the system’s advanced features for improving tax collection rates. Through thorough planning and innovative solutions for data migration, the production cutover occurred one day ahead of schedule.

“We have been very pleased with the support we received to get the new system installed and are looking forward to continued benefits as we move through the tax year,” said Henderson County Tax Collector Terry Lyda.

Catawba County implemented the system in June, while Harnett County followed suit in July. Catawba County’s Tax and Information Technology departments played a key role in converting data to the new system. Catawba has already begun to create some of its own custom reports and is taking advantage of the system’s open, industry-standard database. These reports will be shared with each of the other participating counties. In Harnett County, excellent teamwork from the Tax and MIS departments ensured that the project stayed on schedule and prepared the county to send out its annual real estate bills on the new system.

These initial deployments of NCPTS have provided some encouraging achievements – as well as some lessons learned. After the initial software development was completed, the actual implementation projects were completed on schedule and under budget. This is significant given that similar product implementations around the United States have a failure rate of between 30 and 50 percent. The original goal of fostering best practices is occurring, and counties are assisting each other. Feedback from these first five counties is helping to improve the software and the implementation processes in areas such as training, documentation and reports.

These early successes have paved the way for the next group of counties preparing to implement NCPTS. Working together, counties are using new technologies to increase efficiency, reduce cost and improve service to the citizens of North Carolina.

For more information on NCPTS, contact Rebecca Troutman at (919) 715-4360 or NCACC Project Manager John E. Whitehurst at (919) 715-2893.