Oregon Revenue Agency pivots to in‑house rebuild after vendor fails to deliver 'Elvis' industrial valuation system

Betsy Einholt, director of the Oregon Department of Revenue, told the General Government Subcommittee on March 24 that the department is abandoning its external vendor and will rebuild the second phase of the Electronic Valuation Information System, known as Elvis, on the agency's existing Gentax platform using in‑house staff.

The update matters because Elvis is intended to automate valuation of industrial property — a process the department says affects more than 800 sites and generates roughly $800 million in tax revenue per biennium for counties — and the shift affects project timing, staffing and contract resolution.

Einholt told the committee Elvis is the final piece of a decade‑long IT modernization effort. Brahm Ekstrand, property tax division administrator, described the industrial valuation work Elvis is meant to support: the division values both real and personal property for industrial sites, tracking potentially hundreds of thousands of individual assets at large facilities and producing values that counties use to bill taxpayers. "Elvis will be instrumental in centralizing the data as well as providing much needed automation to what is currently an entirely manual process," Ekstrand…