Cook County taxing bodies that have waited months to get their cut of property tax revenues will receive a partial payment in the coming days, Treasurer Maria Pappas announced late Friday.
Schools, libraries, villages and park districts have been waiting for their share of revenue from taxpayers’ bills for months. Thanks to a rocky uptake of a new technology system that handles data between property tax offices, that distribution process has been doubly delayed: first when bills went out late and then again as county officials struggled with their “distribution” system to correctly apportion the $8 billion in collected dollars out to the county’s hundreds of districts after bills were paid.
Pappas’ staff worked over the holiday to build a stopgap solution to get those districts about 20% of their money via ACH, or automated clearinghouse transaction, according to a release. About $2.3 billion will be distributed from the county straight into about 500 taxing bodies’ accounts, according to Pappas’ office.
School districts that rely almost entirely on property tax revenue to operate have complained they have thrown money away on interest and administrative costs from borrowing or from cashing out other investments that would otherwise accrue interest in order to manage their cash flow. Without their distributions, those interests costs would continue growing.
The stopgap measure won’t replace the latest system fix, part of a roughly decade-long upgrade the county undertook with Texas-based vendor Tyler Technologies. Authorities will have to go through a true-up process after that fix is in to make sure final distributions are correct.
Problems have spanned across and between Tyler and the county’s main property tax offices — the clerk, treasurer and assessor — over the years. Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle’s office doesn’t have a statutory role in the property tax system, but her Bureau of Technology maintains the mainframe computers that hold decades of property tax data and has often served as referee.
The latest error cropped up when officials discovered Tyler had not been given the correct file to run their tests. Pappas last week blamed the Bureau of Technology, which originally maintained the data on the old system, and faulted Tyler’s past failures in a Friday release. Preckwinkle’s office said it functions essentially as a waiter and provide what’s asked. The problem “was the responsibility of the Treasurer, and no other office,” Preckwinkle’s office said in a statement.
As of Monday, there were about a dozen problems still to fix related to distributions on the county’s property tax tracker. Other fixes are still needed to handle refunds and certificates of error.
“It’s my hope that we will be able to distribute the remaining funds collected through Tyler’s system,” Pappas said in the release. “But if not, I will do whatever is necessary to get the taxing districts the money they so desperately need.”
A.D. Quig
Source link