City advises alternatives after Keystone Collections tax-filing site crashes on tax day

During public comment and council Q&A, members raised widespread failures of Keystone Collections’ tax-filing website on tax day. Council members said users across the region reported intermittent crashes and difficulties completing filings.

City staff told council that Keystone Collections is the third-party vendor that handles earned-income and local tax filings for the city and a number of surrounding municipalities. Staff said the site was intermittently available Sunday and experienced significant problems again on tax day. "We do have on our website the forms that are needed. Some people came in. We supplied the documents they needed when they came to the tax office, which is on the Third Floor," a city staff member said.

City staff advised residents who cannot file online to print the forms from the city's website when available or visit City Hall’s tax office to obtain paper forms and submit by mail with a postmark. Staff said they will contact Keystone Collections to determine the cause of the outage and will ask whether the vendor or relevant authorities will accept postmarks to avoid penalties for residents who could not file electronically.

Council asked whether the city anticipates an extension or grace period; staff said they would follow up with Keystone and expected the vendor to address the issue. The transcript records that staff expected to seek confirmation about extended postmark acceptance but did not report a binding decision during the meeting.

Keystone Collections was identified in the discussion as a regional third-party collector; the city’s tax page and in-person tax office remain available as alternatives while the vendor resolves site availability.