A change in programming caused Athens County Auditor Jill Thompson to have a delay in the tax billing cycle for the 2004 second-half real estate taxes.
For the past fifteen years, the auditor's office has been using Oracle 2.5, a program used to organize tax information. Because of the rising cost of technical maintenance with the system, the auditor's office had to upgrade to a newer system.
Companies would no longer support Oracle 2.5, and the county could not continue to afford its use. After discussing with other counties who had made a similar upgrade, Thompson said, she made the decision to upgrade after the first-half tax collection in April.
Thompson hoped the conversion would go quickly. However, it was like Murphy's Law; everything that could go wrong did
she said.
For example, in the print off, the escrow proofs were incomplete -according to Ohio law, it is necessary to have complete proofs. Because this tax breakdown is a requirement, the office had to correct the problem.
A major problem was that during the upgrade, maintenance could not occur with the office's other duties. That caused a back up of two months worth of work that the office had to complete after the upgrade.
The auditor's office presented the bills on Oct. 4, and the second-half real estate taxes will be due Nov. 8. Thompson said the office was reluctant to send out information until they knew the new due date.
Since they have released information explaining the situation, there have been no complaints, Thompson said.
The staff has been great; there were some late nights but we worked through it she said.
The office will be more organized in the future because of this upgrade, Thompson said.
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Nora Banoun
