Contra Costa County Automates Property Tax Payment Processing

Today, Oct 2004 by Hamilton, Deborah E

The County of Contra Costa, California, was incorporated in 1850 as one of the original 27 counties of the State of California. It is one of the nine counties in the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area, and the ninth most populous county in California. Due to the presence of relatively high-wage skilled jobs and relatively wealthy residents, Contra Costa County achieves high rankings among all California counties on a variety of income measurements.

Nearly 35 employees work in the Contra Costa County Treasurer - Tax Collector's office, which processes over $1 billion in secured property tax payments annually. Approximately 3400,000 tax bills are issued each year, and most are received by the Tax Collector in two installments. The County also processes annual taxes on thousands of boats, airplanes and businesses.

Until 2001, the Contra Costa County Treasurer - Tax Collector's office was processing all tax payments manually. Much of their data entry was outsourced, and significant fees were being accrued. Furthermore, internal processing and data entry took employees away from other, more important tasks, including their ability to provide the best customer service. In this remittance-heavy office, the County was spending too much time and money processing tax payments.

Enter a Data and Image Capture Solution

The solution to Contra Costa County's paper-intensive and laborious remittance processing efforts could be found in automation. The Treasurer-Tax Collector's office enlisted the software development and implementation services of RT Lawrence Corporation, a provider of image-based check, remittance processing and ACH products and services.

As part of the complete, end-to-end remittance solution designed and implemented by RT Lawrence Corporation, the County purchased two NCR 7780 high-speed item processing transports. Each unit, which can process up to 500 documents per minute, features an automatic document feeder for up to 1,200 documents, MICR and OCR reading, imaging, encoding, endorsing and several sorting pockets. Each 7780 used in Contra Costa County Treasurer-Tax Collector's back office captures images and data from checks and remittance stubs.

The data passes through RTLFiRST, a complete remittance processing application developed by RT Lawrence Corporation for automatic processing and uploading to Contra Costa County's mainframe. The images are transferred into a SQL Server database for storage and retrieval.

A significant upgrade is currently in progress, which will ACH-enable the Contra Costa County Treasurer-Tax Collector's office. Check data from tax payments will be transferred into an ACH file for immediate processing through the County's chosen financial institution and, ultimately, the Federal Reserve.

County Reduces Headcount, Focuses on Service

The solution in use at the Treasurer-Tax Collector's office is saving significant time and money for Contra Costa County. They are working with a smaller staff, after being able to reduce the number of full-time positions by five as a result of automating their payment processing system. And their current staff is able to focus on providing better customer service as well as additional services they previously didn't have time to offer.

"First operational in 2001, our remittance processing solution from RT Lawrence Corporation has enabled us to do more with less over the past several years," said Craig Loop, property tax systems business manager for Contra Costa County Treasurer-Tax Collector. "We are now a leaner, more streamlined organization, and we have saved significant time and expenses by automating this labor-intensive payment process. We are excited about the new built-in ACH processing system, which will provide additional savings for Contra Costa County."

The new ACH-enabled upgrade removes the process of physically taking hundreds of thousands of checks to the bank. It will also lower the cost of check clearing by four cents for each check processed through the new ACH clearing conduit, while also decreasing float due to the reduction of check clearing times.

Deborah Hamilton is a freelance writer and marketing consultant. She can be reached toll free at 877-867-1215 or deborah@mediamondeinc.com.