County Tax Status Shut Down For Repairs

A Post Related to Today's Herald Column

Pretend it is February 18 and you see this screen (Click here) on the county tax department web site and ask yourself are taxes owed on this property on 2/18/2008.

The person preparing a closing statement on a sale of the property saw this statement, "Real Estate Bill Information As of 2/18/2008", and assumed the balance was $0.00. If that is what you thought you, too, would be wrong.

This page actually gives her tax status for 2007 taxes. The fact that taxes were owed for 2006 on 2/18/2008 does not show up. The page provides nothing, however, to explain this.

A closing was made in reliance on that page and guess what--someone was out $1858.15 because those taxes and penalties were not listed on the closing statement. The attorney appeared before the commissioners but received no relief. As a result of the appearance before the commissioners, the inquiries feature of the Online Tax Payments And Inquiries page has been disabled.

The Disclaimer
County Tax Administrator Dwane Brinson showed the commissioners screen shots that would have given the correct information had the user "understood the system." Since the system is not operating, the e-Lee Dispatch could not fully verify its operations as it was designed when the alleged problem occurred.

One screen shot on the tax department web page showed a disclaimer in large print that warned against relying on the data in the tax portion in the system. Actually almost every page on the county site has a small print Disclaimer Link that gives a similar statement. (Click here to read it.) As you can see, it says in effect, "this information is for internal use, we don't guarantee it to be correct, and you (the public) should not rely on it."

Here is a clue folks--that disclaimer isn't news to the public. Given experience with the majority that controls the county commissioners, most of us don't rely on what comes out of the county office buildings anyway. Few will ever forget Bob Brown's politically fatal statement "Trust Us" in regard to the proposed sales tax. Both the tax and Brown went on to defeat.

To his credit, once the problem was identified, the recently appointed Tax Administrator, Dwane Brinson, has moved swiftly to have changes made to the screens to help users understand the limitations of the screens and what they actually mean. In addition, he plans a major training session for users (lawyers, Realtors, and others) on August 21 to attempt to insure that users of the system understand how to use the system and to get a reliable answer. But the disclaimer will still be there.

Editor's Note: More follow-up on the original implementation of the web site and our local governments difficulty using web sites coming shortly. Also check my new post on the e-Lee Dispatch Plus in which I comment on Ty Stumpf's last column. The RSS feeds have not updated the content so what you see on the side about my post. They will take several hours to update.