2013 Winter Newsletter

BEST PRACTICES ―USING THE INTERNET TO IMPROVE PROC- ESSES FOR YOUR CUSTOMERS AND YOUR STAFF‖ When our boss, Osceola County Property Appraiser Katrina Scarborough, was running for office in 2008, one of the cornerstones of her campaign was to im- prove the office website and to maximize the use of technology. One of the ways she set out to accomplish this goal was to offer the customers the flexibility for filing the Homestead Exemption online. Immediately upon taking office we met with representatives from Bruce Harris and Associates Inc. in regard to upgrading our website, as well as the implementation of online filing for Homestead Ex- emption. At first the project did not seem as though it would be so complicated, however, we would find that it was more arduous than we thought. Ms. Scarborough wanted the Homestead Exemption online filing to be user friendly, while concur- rently cutting down on the amount of time our staff actually worked on applications. With this in mind, we set out to include a few automatic checks to help verify that the applicant qualified for the exemption. Kenny Pennington, CFE Currently, our customer will access our website and bring up the online Homestead Application, once they complete the questions and submit the application, it goes through a series of checks through the Florida Department of Motor Vehicles databases. The customer‘s driver‘s license is checked through the department‘s Driver and Vehicle Express (DAVE) database. Next, their social security number, driver‘s license number, and date of birth are confirmed through other databases. Once this process is completed, the application will then be placed in one of three queues; if everything is completed and verified it will go into the approved queue. In the event everything is complete but there is a conflict of information during the verification process, it will then be placed in the complete queue which is then investigated by our staff. Conclusively, if there is missing information, the appli- cation is placed in the missing data queue; these customers are then contacted by our staff in order to retrieve the missing information. The system also has a denial procedure which assists us in the following manner. Once our staff has exhausted every effort to complete an application, they can pull up the information and check off the denied exemption, as well as the reason for the denial. The system then creates a PDF of the denial let- ter which can be printed and mailed to the applicant. Another benefit is that the customer is allowed to file for any of the other exemptions at the same time. Unfortunately, it will not allow someone to file for additional exemption(s) at a later date. Currently, the system will only allow a single owner or married couple to file for the exemption, however, as of January 1st, we are rolling out a new and improved version which will allow any number and type of owners to apply for the exemption. Our staff will also have the capability to see if someone started an “ We are very excited about what we are able to offer the public online and look forward to continue to offer even more services.”

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Winter 2013 Newsletter of the FCIAAO