Bucks County Tax Bills Mailed Despite Software Chaos

Bucks County’s 53 tax collectors successfully issued nearly 250,000 real estate tax bills within a matter of days due to a software failure that threatened to derail the annual mailing.

The delay originated at the Bucks County Board of Assessment after a vendor’s software updates broke existing customizations used to compile property assessment data, officials said.

The technical glitch pushed the delivery of tax duplicate files to municipal collectors back to Feb. 25 and 26, later than the typical mid-February delivery.

“This is a process that typically we have two weeks to three weeks to complete,” said Tammy Sutton, president of the Bucks County Tax Collectors Association and the Newtown Township tax collector.

Sutton said the delay left some tax collectors with only one to two business days to reconcile data, communicate with print vendors, and proof the final bills.

Despite the narrow window, 96 percent of collectors completed the loading, reconciliation, and mailing process within four business days of receiving their data. Approximately 65 percent of collectors met the statutory deadline of March 2, which was shifted from the usual March 1 because it fell on a Sunday this year.

Sutton said 45 percent of the bills were in the mail by Feb. 27, which is three days ahead of the legal requirement.

The software issue and the recovery from it required a massive manual effort after the software vendor and county staff were unable to find a timely resolution to correct the problem, officials said.

“There was a lot of manual vetting of the numbers that had to occur,” said Bucks County CFO Jeannette Weaver. “Everybody spent many man hours overtime just putting in the effort needed to get those files out the door.”

The tax collection process bills for the county’s 54 municipal taxing authorities and the annual process requires coordination between collectors, software vendors, and printers.

Sutton told the Bucks County Commissioners that the performance of the tax collectors under pressure was noteworthy because many of the county’s tax collectors are new to the elected office this year.

“This was a stellar performance by your Bucks County tax collectors,” Sutton said, adding that the group acted with “calm and focused professionalism.”

Weaver expressed gratitude for the collaboration between the county workers and tax collectors.

The county’s CFO said the county is working to be certain the technical issues are not repeated for the next collection season.

“What we experienced this year should be a situation that doesn’t reoccur,” Weaver said. “I can’t be more proud of how we all worked together in this situation.”