(Santa Ana, CA) – Orange County, Calif. – The Orange County Auditor-Controller’s Office has announced its new Property Tax System (PTS) was named a 2023 Achievement Award Winner by the National Association of Counties (NACo). The NACo Achievement Awards recognize innovative County government programs from across the United States. To view the PTS Award description, please click here.
“I am so pleased to announce that our PTS Team within A-C IT and the County Department users have been recognized with this prestigious award,” said Auditor-Controller Andrew Hamilton. “I’d like to congratulate the PTS team members at the County on this exciting achievement, and I’d like to thank NACo for recognizing their hard work and the quality of the newly implemented system. The development of the PTS was an extremely challenging undertaking and our team performed magnificently. The valuable lessons learned in this project, and its successful outcome is something that we feel all Counties could benefit from.”
The County’s legacy property tax system was originally developed in the 1980s on a mainframe environment with programming languages and a database that were past their end-of-life. Additionally, finding knowledgeable and skilled staff to support the system was becoming ever more challenging as the system was antiquated and out of date.
Using a team comprised of internal resources, previously embedded vendors, former retired staff returning to assist, and a third-party vendor, the project faced many challenges including the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Despite facing overwhelming obstacles and finding themselves working remotely in the midst of a global pandemic, our PTS Development Team successfully developed the new system without any operating issues, seamlessly and effectively running now for over 6 months,” said the Director of Auditor-Controller IT. “I’m so proud of this team, and would like to thank everyone for their dedication and commitment to ensuring we not only succeeded, but developed a fully automated system with the highest quality.”
Orange County moved its new automated property tax system into production in September, 2022 in the middle of the Secured Tax Roll season. The PTS system’s quality proved itself as it continues to operate without issue improving the department’s accuracy, efficiency and resiliency for the County of Orange.
The Orange County Auditor-Controller’s Office and its 400+ employees work to ensure the County operates financially responsibly and effectively. Duties including payroll for over 18,000 employees, accounts payable, Information Technology, general accounting services, property tax, Satellite Accounting and financial reporting are just a few of the mandated responsibilities of the Office.
