Tax & Assessment Web Portal

Erie County, Pennsylvania draws users to its website for valuable online tax and assessment information.

Background

Erie County, like most counties in the United States, is a place where information is managed – from the essential tasks of gathering, storing and organizing information to distributing information to residents and businesses that drive to the courthouse seeking it. Traditionally, a primary function of a county courthouse is maintaining and managing a comprehensive range of information services for customers living within the domain of their county. Today, consumers demand county information – and there’s plenty of information – online and immediately.

This case study focuses on how Distributed Network Software transformed the traditional tax and assessment information services into a popular online portal for Erie County, Pennsylvania.

Situation

The responsibility of maintaining and managing tax and assessment information within any county government is typically held by a few departments with separate goals and budgets. As separation of responsibilities is normal so is the differing information technology within those departments.

For example, a tax department may choose a Linux operating system to manage servers along with open source database to store the information resulting in a zero-dollar startup cost, whereas the assessment department selects a licensed solution with widespread support and service and pays licensing and an annual support fee. While both concepts will work, they rarely work well together.

This is exactly what occurred in Erie County; two or more different departments with different ideas about software needed to supply people with current, accurate and relevant parcel information. The users, like citizens, realtors, financial institutions, and other professionals, hardly ever care about operating systems and databases when it comes to locating information about their land parcel or tax bill. The solution below describes how Distributed Network Software solved the differing technology dilemma in Erie County, Pennsylvania.

Solution

Distributed Network Software was contracted to put county assessment information online. Since tax and assessment information was initially stored in the same database, it was relatively simple task to parse unnecessary data then display relevant parcel information in a browser. The county assessment software used at the courthouse is a mixture of COBOL and PASCAL languages that stores data in an Oracle database.

The assessment database is stored onsite and maintained by the assessment software provider. Transforming the tax and assessment data from the assessment server to a meaningful web application required intermediary processes that were not available on the assessment database server.

Distributed Network Software used Microsoft SQL Server to pull assessment data into the intermediary server and then transform the data into meaningful web-ready assessment and tax information. The transformed web-ready information is then pushed to a web server for citizens to use for parcel and tax lookup. Administrative officials elected to host the assessment web software at Distributed Network Software’s commercial hosting facility for needed bandwidth and redundancy.

Shortly after the initial setup, Distributed Network Software provided online delinquent tax payment for Erie County citizens. Parcel owners are currently able to pay delinquent property taxes online using secure transactions.

After a few years of popular usage, the tax functionality in the assessment software was replaced by separate tax collection software that resides on a RISC server. Distributed Network Software now pulls data from the assessment server as well as from a separate tax server.

The different platforms with different operating systems and databases, holding common tax and assessment data is automatically transformed every day into web-ready information.

This information is used by thousands of web users daily located in all parts of the world. Distributed Network Software uses Microsoft Visual Studio IDE, SVN source control, and Process Tracker software to manage this enterprise project.

Benefits

The result of transforming data from many different servers into usable web-ready information allows citizens to view and verify their parcels from their living room. It allows web users to research comparables and email parcel information to any valid email address. The more popular daily information includes:

Sales Information
Parcel Maps
Page and Book Numbers
Comparable Sales based on location, type and distance
Owner Information
Parcel Photographs and Sketches

Now a user can surf to the county courthouse website to get valuable tax and assessment information online. As a matter of fact, any user in the world is now exposed to all Erie County parcel information at www.eriecountygov.org.

“The 200,000 plus Erie County parcels are now online in large part because of Distributed Network Software. Putting assessment information online saves time and expense for our citizens.”

Tom Lyons
Director of Finance
Erie County, Pennsylvania