The second installments of Cook County property tax bills are theoretically due on Thursday, Aug. 1.
But thanks to technology problems, the bills haven’t even been mailed out yet.
What we know:
The question Fox 32 sought to answer was when would those Cook County tax bills be ready to go?
The consensus was, thanks to those technical problems, “we just don’t know.”
Cook County public officials blame a 10-year-old contract with a Texas-based company called Tyler Technologies for the delay. The contract was inked by the county in 2015 and was supposed to modernize the property tax billing system within three to five years.
It hasn’t exactly gone according to plan.
“There’s just been a lot of mistakes along the way that the county is trying to fix along with our vendor, but we don’t have a fully functioning system,” said Cook County Commissioner Bridget Degnan (D-Chicago), long a critic of the contract.
What they’re saying:
Degnan said county office holders have had to work through snafu after snafu. On Tuesday, Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas revealed the company had made so many errors that the taxpayers might get the wrong bill if they were to be mailed out today.
“A user has to go through that to make sure all the numbers are complete, all the bills are complete, that the bills that are going out are the bills that should be issued to those people. So if the bills are wrong, someone is being asked to pay money that they don’t owe,” Degnan said.
A spokesperson for Tyler Technologies said: “We continue to fully support Cook County as they move forward with full system implementation.”
The spokesperson goes on to say the process is made more difficult because they’re trying to get multiple offices to work together on the same system: the assessor, the clerk, the treasurer, and the county board.
A Chicago Tribune investigation revealed that the county tried to fire the company several times, to no avail. Degnan said it would cost the county far more to go with a new system should they bail on Tyler Technologies now.
Meanwhile, DuPage County is on time with its tax bills. A spokesperson there told Fox 32 they also use Tyler Technologies. They also had some problems, but they have worked to solve them.