Nearly a week after the adjusted deadline for real estate and personal property tax payments, mail payments are still coming in to the Franklin County Collector’s office.
Around $123 million of the $130 million owed to 67 entities the office collects for had been received, County Collector Doug Trentmann said.
Of the 135,000 records that were initially owed on, 104,500 had been paid as of Friday morning, Trentmann said. But some records mailed in time remain to be counted, even though the county is seeing fewer mail payments come in after the deadline than it has in the past, Trentmann said.
“It’s about a third of what we did have, which is still a lot,” he said.
Trentmann attributes the decrease in last-minute mail payments to people mailing the bills earlier and paying more online.
While he didn’t have final numbers, Trentmann said the county’s Forte computer system had more than 2,600 online payments the last weekend before the Jan. 15 deadline. That compares to 4,000 payments to Forte in all of the 2021 tax season, though the 2021 number doesn’t include payments to the county’s mobile app, which was not available for 2022 payments.
“I’d say it’s way up,” Trentmann said of payments on Forte.
The deadline was pushed back from the traditional Dec. 31 after the county was not able to process tax payments until Nov. 22 because of problems related to the transition of county information technology services from AQM to NOC. That led to bills not being mailed to taxpayers until after Dec. 1.
“This week feels like the first week of January for us,” Trentmann said. “It was almost like we had two deadlines because a lot of people still paid by the 31st.”
The extra two weeks of taking payments before the deadline meant some of the seven seasonal workers the collector’s office brings in for tax season had to return to college before the office was done processing payments, Trentmann said. The office has five full-time employees, including Trentmann.
That means people who mailed payments should be patient in waiting for receipts to be mailed to them, he said.
“We’re down some people, so it’s going to take us a little longer,” Trentmann said.
Those who did not pay by the deadline will owe penalty and interest of 2 percent each month for up to nine months, after which a final 9 percent penalty will be added, if not paid.
Trentmann expects bills to be ready by early November in 2023.
“The new IT company is pretty confident they can do that,” he said.
