INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY/Scanner helps speed property tax payments

If paying taxes is one of the “sure things” in life, cashiers for Cook County (Ill.) Treasurer Edward Rosewell know that a twice-yearly crush of property owners who pay their tax bills in person is just as certain.

Some 170,000 taxpayers — 10 percent of the 1.5 million total — pay in person each year.

Long-standing mail delivery problems made many residents leery of putting their payments in the mail. Taxpayers’ procrastination also contributed to the last-minute crowds.

Under the old system, Cook County tax bills were passed through a stationary mechanical optical character recognition (OCR) scanner at the cashier’s work station. Each bill carries a line of type that identifies the parcel number, the six-month period the bill represents and the amount due.

The bills often required several passes through the scanner for a good “read,” and even then information could be missing from the printout if the scanner failed to read the data. Cashiers often had to manually enter the data, which slowed down the process and lengthened the lines.

So the treasurer’s office spent less than $14,000 to replace the mechanical OCR scanners with seven scanning stations made by Caere Corp., Los Gatos, Calif. Each consists of a hand-held scanning wand and Model 833 reader. The cashier passes the wand over the scan line rather than relying on a scanner to read it.

The nearly 100 percent first-pass read rate has improved accuracy, speeded up the process and reduced taxpayers’ waiting time. The cashiers’ terminals connect to a minicomputer in each office, which uploads a day’s transactions overnight to a mainframe. Three laser printers produce the tax bills from the data stored on the mainframe.

Purchasing the new wands and readers cost less than what the treasurer’s office had spent maintaining the old scanners, says Assistant Treasurer Barbara Gorell.

The treasurer’s office eventually plans to implement a bar code system for handling delinquent tax bills, and the new scanners recognize several bar code symbols, she says.

“You can see the difference in how quickly the lines move,” says Gorell. “They (property owners) don’t want to stand in line, but it seems they all want to wait until the last day to come in to pay. Now the cashier only has to scan bills once, take the money, give a receipt and the taxpayers are on their way.”

The Cook County Department of Revenue, which issues and collects fees for six different types of permits, plans to use the same type scanners to improve efficiency and customer service.