With a new federal tax code looming in 2018, many San Francisco residents wanted to file their property taxes for the coming year before any of the new rules went into effect, potentially costing them money.
With this in mind, local media flocked to the San Francisco treasurer’s office in December, hoping to capture footage of long lines and to interview taxpayers. The lines, however, were nonexistent when the reporters arrived, city officials said.
But it wasn’t because nobody was filing their property taxes in advance. In fact, it was the opposite. As much as $241 million in property tax revenue was collected in less than two weeks during December, an amount that represents 11 times what was collected during the same period the previous year. So what changed?
In the fall, the city went live with a new portal that allowed users to do most, if not all, of their tax business online.
“That was absolutely critical, actually,” said Treasurer José Cisneros. “That system itself and its customer service capabilities really allowed these very rushed — and maybe in some ways unprepared — payers to just jump online quickly, whether they had a coupon in hand or not, and be able to find their actual bill on our system, go online and pay it. People were doing this all during those days leading up to the deadline, and many of them on the very last day of the tax year. It was really that system that made those thousands of payments possible.”
The new system, which is powered by Adobe Experience Manager Forms, consolidated what was previously four tax portals into a single system, with simplified language and automated notices for taxpayers. Cisneros' office, which handles city and county payments to the tune of roughly $9 billion a year, is one of the first government organizations at the municipal level to embrace a portal of this scale.
In San Francisco, taxpayers seeking to get their payments in before the new federal code took effect were able to do it from home, rather than going downtown to wait to have them processed manually. This not only saved taxpayers time, but it also saved city staff time that would have previously been spent processing the in-person payments.
Tajel Shah, chief assistant treasurer for San Francisco, said this speaks to a common problem in government: pushing past aged technical infrastructure to create agile products for consumers that expedite dealings with antiquated back-end systems.
