Dougherty County approves tax-collection software upgrade and new computers

Dougherty County commissioners voted unanimously Feb. 3 to upgrade the county’s tax-collection software and to buy new desktop computers and monitors to run the system.

The commission approved a $24,716 purchase from Manatron Inc., doing business as Momentum Technologies, for an upgrade described by county staff as moving the county’s existing VCS tax product toward a VCS Tax Web platform. Commissioners separately approved $26,400 for 30 Dell OptiPlex towers and 35 Dell monitors; county staff said the machines meet the software vendor’s listed minimum requirements.

County officials told the commission the upgrade is intended to improve processing efficiency and reduce the county’s exposure to the kind of incident the tax office experienced last summer, when its tax software was among systems held captive in a ransomware-style event. "Upgrading will allow us to be able to do it more automated," Shauna Josie, tax director, said during discussion.

Assistant County Administrator Barry Brooks said the software will remain hosted on county premises for now, with the option to move to a cloud-hosted configuration later. Brooks and Josie told commissioners the county is not selecting immediate cloud hosting because the vendor’s cloud services and integration tools are not yet in place.

County staff gave these specific cost and implementation details during the meeting: the $24,716 figure covers the software upgrade itself and includes training; if the county moves to vendor-hosted cloud hosting later there would be a one-time setup fee of $5,000 and an annual hosting fee of about $16,000. Josie told the commission the tax office has 33 staff members overall and about eight employees will have full system access to process tax transactions while the rest will have view-only access.

IT staff and commissioners also discussed data integration between the tax system and the county’s payment/purchasing systems. John Dawson, IT manager, said an application programming interface (API) that would automate daily data transfers is not yet available from the vendor. "If you expose it to the Internet, somebody can hack it," Dawson said in a broader comment on risks of cloud-hosted services; he also noted the county has added monitoring and security enhancements since last summer’s incident.

Commissioners said the purchases were budgeted in the capital improvement plan fund balance and that the technology purchases fit a broader equipment life-cycle effort the county is implementing. Staff said they would revisit the vendor’s cloud-hosting and integration capabilities later, after the vendor completes additional work.

Both motions — the software upgrade and the computer/monitor purchase — passed by unanimous consent.

Next steps outlined by staff include completing the on-premise upgrade, deploying the new computers to meet vendor minimums, and later reviewing vendor progress on an API and on hosted/cloud options before committing to additional hosting costs.