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Like many local government agencies, Horry County Auditor’s Office regularly faced the challenge of processing large volumes of data. This burden meant they had to work with a mix of paper and digital documents. They also had to rely on limited staff to manually extract, verify, and key in critical data across multiple disconnected applications.
Every year, the Auditor’s Office received over 90,000 personal property tax returns. With such a high volume, the six-member staff took nearly six months to complete them. The manual effort behind this process tied up the limited workforce for half of the year, leaving other tasks untouched.
The Auditor’s Office decided they needed to modernize the process once and for all. They worked with Horry County IT/GIS to reduce the volume of paper records by implementing OnBase Unity Forms for electronic tax form submission and OnBase Advanced Capture for digitization of paper forms.
The timing of this digitization project proved to be just right, as over the next two years, the global pandemic further impacted the resources available for this manual processing due to staff working remotely with limited access to the office. Still, there was an opportunity for additional modernization.
While reducing the volume of paper records helped, much of the process remained mostly manual. The county needed process automation, but this was proving to be a challenge because the QS/1 tax processing software used by the County Auditor’s Office had no APIs or other means of integration with line of business applications, including OnBase.
This is when the Horry County IT/GIS department decided to give robotic process automation (RPA) a try, said Timothy Oliver, Horry County CIO. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is often a good fit for repetitive, manual data entry processes where system integration is not an option. Having originally experimented with Blue Prism RPA, Horry County eventually settled on Hyland RPA due to its ease of use and better integration with OnBase.
Horry County Auditor’s Office put RPA to work on automating the repetitive, tedious task of keying in tax return data into QS/1 application. As it performs its task, Hyland RPA uses conditional business rules to help it tackle any complexities. For example, if a constituent submitting a return claims a real estate property as their primary residence, Hyland RPA verifies this information against another line of business application — Aumentum — and then proceeds accordingly. Hyland RPA can even use rules to recognize when values submitted are likely erroneous or fraudulent and will then forward the flagged return for a human auditor to review. In its first year of implementation, Hyland RPA successfully processed a third of the 90,000 returns without human interaction, which significantly unburdens Auditor’s Office staff and frees them up for higher value work.
Oliver acknowledges that configuring RPA business rules was a learning process. It’s not always easy to take years of human experience and translate them into repeatable logical rules RPA can follow. But the county’s investment of time in building and validating business rules paid off, reducing the number of errors and exceptions in the business process.
One unique benefit of Hyland RPA is that every action of the bot is logged, which enables easy troubleshooting during configuration. It also simplifies compliance initiatives by giving auditors access to every system interaction and change to tax files.
Hyland RPA has proven itself to be a capable helper as it has reduced the workload on human workers in the Horry County Auditor’s Office. But this is just the beginning, Oliver says. Today, RPA is a new tool in the IT/GIS department’s toolbox, and during project meetings, Oliver and his staff are often asked, “Can’t RPA do that?”
As with any tool, Oliver knows that it will provide the most value for certain kinds of tasks. His department already has their sights on what’s next for Hyland RPA at Horry County.
