1991-02-25 Regular Meeting - Laserfiche WebLink

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• CITY OF LA PORTE INTER-OFFICE MEMORANDUM CJ T0: Robert T. Herrera, City Manager FROM: Jeff Litchfield, Director of Financ~_.~~" DATE: February 19, 1991 SUBJECT: Delinquent Tax Attorney In October and November of 1990, I tested the market for Legal Firms to act as Delinquent Tax Attorney's for the City. My mission was to determine what services were available to the City by firms acting as delinquent tax attorney's. As background information, the attorney is paid by the taxpayer with a state law defined 158 fee that is attached to the tax amount once it has been delinquent for five months. This fee is collected by the City and is forwarded to the attorney. Since this fee is set by the State, in reviewing a contract with a firm for the collection of delinquent taxes, the contract needs to be reviewed from a basis of services rendered and not amount paid. What I found when talking with other firms is that the current market trend is for the Attorney to provide any computing resources that are necessary to collect all taxes (both current and delinquent). Armed with this information and the fact that we have had a good relationship with Mr. Joyner for so long and that he currently collects for the School Districts (whose boundaries are pretty much in line with ours), I sat down with Mr. Joyner to see what he could offer us. After negotiating with Mr. Joyner, he agreed to provide us with a computer system which we could use for the collection of all property taxes. You will recall that we have had a tremendous problem with our current tax system. The MIS Plan that was published in August of 1988 called for a complete re-write of the tax system because of its problems. Because of the timing of the hiring of the MIS Manager/Programmer, we were unable to make any improvements to the system in 1989. In 1990, the time constraints placed on the MIS Manager/Programmer prevented a re-write of the system. He was able to make a few minor changes that did improve our operation.