White Paper

VRS Makes Processing Property Taxes Perfectly Clear

The flow of paperwork through the government machine can be overwhelming. Whether here in the U.S. or with our neighbors in Canada, no one is immune to the deluge of tax documentation. The city of Calgary in the province of Alberta is responsible for assessing property based on market values, which are used to calculate annual property taxes. The city processes property assessment data and documentation for more than 350,000 home and business owners.

It is important for properties to be assessed quickly so taxes can be levied and money collected to maintain municipal programs. Valuations must be updated annually by processing survey forms faxed or mailed to the assessment office by property owners.
 

The Challenge

The site of the XV Olympic Winter Games in 1988, the city of Calgary tasked its Assessment Business Unit to process a mounting volume of paper documents from its expanding population base. Perceived by its citizens as a big city with a small town atmosphere, Calgary grew to a 2000 population of 860,749, up by more than 122,000 people from 1994. The city is expected to reach more than 1.25 million people by 2024, a jump of 70 percent over the 1994 population of 738,184. Residents, embracing municipal growth, have supported an increase in property taxes to provide for the new infrastructure to accommodate the burgeoning citizenry.

To efficiently manage property tax assessments for this population expansion, the city had to find a better way to gather property information than manual processing. With more than 1 million documents processed and higher volumes expected in coming years, the system had become expensive and labor-intensive.

To streamline the  process and reduce time and cost associated with tabulating property taxes, the city deployed a forms processing and quality control solution that utilizes Kofax VirtualReScan (VRS). The project, developed by Seward Consulting, an imaging solutions and consulting firm, was designed to help Calgary more effectively manage, share and control municipal documents and records throughout city departments. VRS, serving at the front line of the installation, was charged with performing the critical function of accurately capturing all forms of document images.
 

The Solution

VRS is an integral part of the city's automated forms processing strategy for scanning, capturing, loading and indexing paper documents. VRS' advanced document image enhancement capabilities enable the city to handily process documents which are difficult to scan using other methods. Thanks to VRS, Calgary's electronic document management system can process old and sometimes deteriorating documents and successfully recognize images of documents printed on colored paper.

VRS supports the city's Cardiff TELEform forms processing solution by enhancing character and handwriting-recognition accuracy. The application uses small peel-and-stick labels that serve as mini-forms. These labels are attached to tax assessment surveys and include the information required to load and index a scanned document. VRS helps ensure accurate recognition of these labels. This approach has successfully replaced the manual task of data entry. As a result, the city can process large quantities and many types of paper documents in a very short time.

VRS maximizes readability by continuously checking and adjusting for scanning alignment, brightness, contrast and image clarity. Any inconsistencies are immediately corrected so only the straightest, most readable images are released into the system.

"The combination of Cardiff and Kofax technologies has significantly improved the department's productivity and revolutionized the data-gathering process with customer survey forms," said Martin Wong, project manager for the city of Calgary. "The technologies facilitate a consistent approach to processing customer survey forms.

"With TELEform's flexible information capture capabilities, our business units can accurately read, interpret and transfer data from different sources of documents, both forms and non-forms, into a consolidated database. The addition of VRS has significantly improved the quality of the scanned images, particularly some very old property assessment cards. VRS' image enhancement capabilities resulted in scanned images that are often better than the original."
 

The Bottom Line -- ROI

With VRS, the city has improved the overall quality of scanned images. The technology has reduced the time-consuming data-validation task, allowing staff to focus on other responsibilities.

"A single city technician can now process up to 1,500 documents per day with 99 percent data and process accuracy," Wong said. "Without these technologies, our productivity would be cut in half."

Moving Forward

The second phase of the project will address building permit applications, police case files, finance documents, such as purchase orders and vendor invoices, as well as human resource records. The city expects the original 1,250 end-user base to expand to 2,000 users in 2002 and potentially 4,000 internal users by 2003.

"Building on the project's success in the tax and assessment business unit, the city plans to implement the document capture solution in other city departments in 2002," said Michael Burant, Calgary account manager at Seward. "The city also is looking at extending the system's Internet capabilities to enable residents to respond to property assessments surveys online and allow city staff to access information directly from their office or remote locations. The city also plans to expand the system's Internet capabilities enabling residents to access to various city documents online."

The combination of a wide range of technologies is enabling the city of Calgary to streamline the tax collection process and provide for future expansion of document processing tasks. With the help of Kofax, the city can now speed the processing tax assessment documents. And it's important to note that the system benefits both sides of the tax equation. While a more efficient process accelerates the collection of taxes to fund municipal budgets. It also helps ease the tax burden for owners of properties that decline in value.

Solution Toolkit

  • Kofax VirtualReScan
  • Four Kofax Adrenaline Boards
  • Fujitsu scanners:
    • Three M4097D
    • One M4099D with VRS
    • One M4990C
  • One Cardiff TELEform automated data capture/forms processing software.
  • One Adlib express for automated PDF conversion of documents
  • One PlumTree portal
  • One e-Publish module from OpenText for document publishing