County updates software program

Beaufort County rolled out a new

$1.5 million tax software program last week, replacing an antiquated system that officials say was at least partly to blame for an embarrassing $1.4 million accounting error last year.

Up until now, record-keeping for the county's tax increment financing districts, or TIFs, required county employees to do multiple calculations by hand. TIFs are districts where a portion of property tax revenue is diverted to pay for redevelopment projects.

"We did not have provisions to calculate or manage TIFs," said Ted Anderson, Management Information Systems director, whose department has logged long hours recently installing the new software.

"When you made changes you had to coordinate with all the tax offices -- treasurer, assessor, auditor. It was this huge process that was all being handled manually," Anderson said. "Frankly, I don't see how they did it."

The Bluffton Township Fire District, which is located in one of the TIF districts, was shorted $1.4 million dollars about a year ago when a county employee misplaced a decimal point.

But Anderson said the new system, created by Portage, Mich.-based Manatron, eliminates much of the chance for human error by performing TIF calculations automatically.

The old software, a dinosaur by information technology standards, was also liable to miscalculate any time the state legislature adopted a major change to South Carolina's tax code, Anderson said.

When the legislature required counties to automatically adjust the values of properties when they are sold, the county didn't have an IT worker familiar enough with the old DOS-based Legacy system to make the necessary adjustments.

"We actually had to bring back an old Beaufort County employee out of retirement ... because no one else knew the old language," Anderson said.

The new software, by comparison, is designed to give towns that have TIFs a better idea of how much money they have to spend on their redevelopment projects.

He said the new system also is easily adaptable to changes in state law. And unlike the old software, it can be updated more easily as technology improves.

"Software is like a living being, you add to it, update it or it just sort of dies."

The Treasurer, Auditor and Assessor's offices started using the new software over the past week, and the Business License department will start using the software this summer.

Anderson said once those departments are up and running on the software, his next project will be to upgrade the new system so it can be used during the county's annual delinquent property tax auction.