Puerto Rico’s Centro de Recaudacion de Ingresos Municipales or CRIM is entrusted with the responsibility of making invoices, receiving funds, and distributing the same. It may be noted the funds are generated from property taxes for the municipalities that fall within the purview of the Caribbean Island.
Why were Truenorth Solutions needed?
However, during the pandemic, it witnessed erosion in revenues and due to the delays, that resulted from collecting them, it was unable to fathom any “actionable intelligence”. This implied that the body lost a huge amount in revenue to the extent that it could only collect a fraction of what its potential income is.
This situation was a cause of concern and to address the issue, Centro de Recaudacion de Ingresos Municipales hurriedly decided to avail the services of Truenorth’s solution. This step had to be taken so that it could evaluate the system, develop a warehouse of data so that all data could be consolidated, identify metrics, and support those projects that would realize and recover its revenue objectives.
What approach did Truenorth take?
The solution that was decided upon was aimed at identifying the paths to data that were critical in leveraging and included the likes of custom coding. This was done so that interfaces for legacy components could be developed and position them in a manner that would permit the organization to address the issues of revenue erosion.
How did Truenorth go ahead with their project and their findings?
It approached the problem in the following ways-
- Truenorth reviewed the billing system of CRIM along with its Esri Geographic Information System.
- While the above procedure was being carried out, Truenorth simultaneously reviewed their property appraisal system, the SQL databases, and Oracle databases.
- Thereafter, the results obtained were compared to the data and information from the census of 2010.
- This was followed by a comparison with data from other agencies as well.
- On analysis of the data, it could find several ways by which it could work upon improving multiple revenues.
- It found many invoices that were not delivered due to the address being incorrect, or the contact information provided was erroneous.
- It also analyzed a set of invoices that were returned and not delivered to the recipients.
- An interesting revelation that was made from their analysis recorded tens of thousands of such properties spread across the Island. These properties were repaired and improved but they did not get a reappraisal. Also, there were properties with thousands of pools and these very properties were not eligible for an exemption from property taxes. So, these were not recorded at all.
The Post-Evaluation & Implementation Phase
After the post-evaluation period, Truenorth incorporated and introduced a so-called data warehouse architecture. This would integrate the data “silos” with the billing, appraisal, and property mapping system of Centro de Recaudacion de Ingresos Municipales.
TimeXtender, the data management platform was selected as the repository of data from the various property-related and tax sources and databases. This provided over 200 pre-configured “certified connectors” that existed between the systems.
As a result, the proof-of-concept stage for the project lasted only two days, which was followed by an additional 15 days so that the production system could integrate the data silos with the databases and systems of Centro de Recaudacion de Ingresos Municipales.
To facilitate agency oversight, Sunrise was configured for producing documentation and data lineage. So, data now gathers from all other property tax systems into the TimeXtender. This data after analysis offers Centro de Recaudacion de Ingresos Municipales’s management and the personnel with reports and dashboards that are customized.
So, accessing their accounts by logging in also allows employees to access Microsoft Power BI dashboards as required.
With the new project wherein Truenorth and Centro de Recaudacion de Ingresos Municipales worked together, as much as $177 million could be recovered from invoicing errors, $22 million as revenue from unrealized property, $46 million from incorrect mailing addresses, $63 million from properties that were not reappraised, and $7 million from incorrect exemptions.
About Centro de Recaudacion de Ingresos Municipales
The Municipal Revenue Collection Center is a Municipal Entity that is independent of the other government agencies. The CRIM is responsible for assessing, notifying, distributing, receiving, collecting the public funds from state subsidies, taxes on property, and funds from the electronic lottery. It is responsible for overseeing the benefits of the Puerto Rico municipalities.
About Truenorth Corporation
Truenorth Corporation is known as a Business and Technology Transformation firm. They address various issues and work with the enterprises as well as the government so that their revenues can be protected, they help firms by offering dynamic and creative techniques and methodologies.
