Travis County Makes Audits Less Taxing

Like many local agencies, the Auditor’s Office in Travis County, Texas, needed to do more with less: While a dynamic housing market increased the volume of property tax refunds by 25% annually since 2018, the office received no extra funding to complete its legally required audits.

To ease the burden, the office’s Risk Evaluation and Consulting (REC) Division built automation and analytics tools, and achieved dramatic results.

The time to process property tax refund audits has plummeted by 91%. It now takes less than five minutes to analyze large batches of property tax refunds; it used to take weeks. And whereas REC previously clocked more than 1,000 auditor hours per year, that number now is roughly 40, and dropping.

The digital transformation began in 2018 when REC launched a dashboard for remote auditing, and it gained speed during the pandemic — a situation that “push[ed] forward how much more data is being collected during that whole refund process,” said John Gomez, the county’s Senior Data Scientist.

Auditors can see when personnel scanned a check into the system or when a refund application was received and scanned, and by whom. Using an algorithm developed with input from the county’s senior auditor, humans need to review only audits that the automated system flags as questionable.

REC believes that regardless of automation’s efficiency, humans always will have a role. But liberating staff from mundane tasks has allowed REC to offer people more interesting work.

“The vision is to automate all of our processes that we can and free standard auditors to just look at exceptions and to look at a whole lot of other areas,” said Gomez. “You need a human being to verify the potential findings.”

The award-winning system could apply to any type of REC audit, with adjustments depending on the specific objective.

This article appeared in our guide, “State and Local: Making an Impact.” For more insights on how state and local governments are using digital transformation to enhance life in their communities, download it here:

Image by Tumisu from Pixabay