Here's what to do while the county straightens out vehicle license tag notices

None of the 11,000 Beaufort County residents whose car tags expire this month has been mailed vehicle renewal notices from the county Auditor's Office, though officials hope to send them out by Thursday or Friday.

The delay is another consequence of ongoing problems the county has had during a computer software conversion.

Residents should contact the Auditor's Office to find out how much they owe and get account information they will need to pay renewal fees online or at the county Treasurer's Office, according to auditor Sharon Burris.

"I've been through a lot of things in the past 27 years," said Burris, who hand-wrote notices for residents during evacuations for hurricanes David and Hugo. "I've never been through anything like this. We're going to do the best we can."

Payment receipts can be taken to any S.C. Department of Motor Vehicles office, where residents can receive updated license tags and decals the same day.

Beth Parks, communications director for the state DMV, said Tuesday there has not yet been a rush of residents coming to the office for renewals -- a process usually done electronically.

"That could be due to many factors," Parks said. "We're not noticing much change, but we're always prepared."

The county auditor's, assessor's and treasurer's offices each have received new software in the past year to replace the nearly 30-year-old Legacy software system. The new software is developed by the Portage, Mich.-based Manatron Inc. The goal was to use the new software to create a single database of information about residents' property taxes and other fees.

Most of the kinks have been worked out in the Assessor's Office, but the auditor and treasurer are still struggling with software glitches, according to Ted Anderson, chief information officer for the county and director of management information systems.

Problems arose when the software failed to properly communicate residents' name and account data between offices, Anderson said.

For example, "John Doe" in the Auditor's Office might appear as "Doe John" in the Treasurer's Office, making it difficult to match payments made to the corresponding bill information. Manatron sent a software fix on Monday that should resolve that issue, Anderson said.

Meanwhile, staff have had to manually correct data for thousands of residents' accounts, which has slowed completion of other tasks -- such as mailing renewal notices.

Four temporary employees have been hired in the Auditor's Office to help enter data into the system by hand, Anderson said. They are paid $10 to $11 per hour and work a 40-hour week.

"When you do a conversion, you basically try to anticipate every permutation," Anderson said. "We knew there were going to be some errors, and we thought they would be data-related. We really didn't anticipate the software errors that we're having."