Tax office hits new record in annual collection rate

Alamance County’s new tax administrator has announced that the local tax office appears to have set a new record with the property tax revenue it took in during the past fiscal year.

Brad Fowler, who took over the county’s tax office in April, reported this record-setting collection rate of 99.21 percent when he appeared before the county’s board of commissioners on Monday to present an annual settlement of property tax collections.

According to Fowler, the 12-month cycle which ended on June 30 saw the tax office take in $111,450,792.78 of the $112,353,067.36 that the county had levied during that period. Fowler added that, in raw dollars and cents, this annual haul represents an increase of about $9.9 million over the previous year. But as a proportion of the total annual levy, the tax office was able to realize a collection rate of 99.21 percent – an improvement of .18 percentage points over the county’s prior collection rate of 99.03 cents.

“The collections staff has done a phenomenal job,” Fowler went on to elaborate in his presentation to the commissioners, “This is the highest collection rate that I can find going back at least 25 years.”

Fowler said that last year’s percentage becomes all the more impressive when factoring out the motor vehicle taxes that the state isn’t able to realize.

While the N.C. DMV obtains tax payments for most vehicles before it renews their registrations, a small portion slips through the state’s net and is ultimately left to the counties to collect. Fowler conceded that the tax office managed to recoup 43.71 percent of these vehicle taxes during the past year – an improvement over the previous year’s figure of 38.65 percent that nevertheless brought down the county’s overall collection percentage. Fowler added that, with these vehicle collections set aside, the county’s percentage rises to 99.31 percent.

[Story continues below special subscription offer.]

The new tax administrator went on to compare this number with the collection rates for five similarly-situated counties – namely Catawba, Davidson, Pitt, Rowan, and Iredell. He noted that, of the five, only Pitt County beat out Alamance with a collection rate of 99.43 percent. Even so, Alamance County exceeded the five county average of 98.84 percent.

Although Fowler came to Alamance County relatively late in this record-breaking cycle, his arrival coincided with a key period in the enforcement process which followed the county’s annual publication of its delinquent taxpayers in March.

Fowler told the commissioners that he has presided over several changes that may have contributed to the county’s increased collection rate for the year. These initiatives have included “new metrics” for staff accountability, a new computerized system tor processing bank attachments, the additional use of rental attachments to collect delinquent payments, and the twice yearly implementation of these assorted attachments.

Fowler nevertheless gave the tax office’s staff much of the credit for the county’s increased collection rate. His deference to these rank-and-file employees was later echoed by commissioner Kelly Allen, who said she was duly impressed when she came in to the tax office in person last month to pay her current property taxes.

“I came in to pay my taxes – and this was after Graham had a huge power failure,” the commissioner recounted, “and they were great working together to take that.”

The commissioners proceeded to vote 3-to-0 to charge Fowler to continue collecting the county’s property taxes and write off $49,392.72 in uncollected taxes from 2015 that have now reached the 10-year statute of limitations.  Absent from Monday’s vote was commissioner Pam Thompson, who was reportedly at a conference in Texas, and John Paisley, Jr., the chairman of Alamance County’s commissioners, who missed Monday’s meeting for health reasons.

- Advertisement -