Transcript:
This is the Okaloosa County Clerk of Court and Comptroller’s office. We maintain all the treasury and the surplus funds for the county. An additional role that we do is we provide the management and receipting of the tourist development tax. We generate over 30 million dollars in tourist-related taxes that is used by the tourist development department to do different things specifically marketing for tourism here in the county that drives part of our economic base.
We have a team who works with all of the short-term rental owners that rent for vacation and other short-term rental properties in the county. And so we maintain the records and the receipting for all of those rentals.
What I pretty much do in the organization and in the department is I assist with the collection of tourist development tax.
Since implementing GovOS, we have had 1,600 tax clients register versus previously we only had about 1,400 registered with us. Even though the number of accounts that we have now have increased, we have not had to increase the time that our personnel spends on actively going through the accounts, collecting taxes, and doing enforcement proceedings.
So the community has really talked about how streamlined the process is. They talk about the easiness of it, how quick and efficient it is, and just being able to send in electronic forms of payment, just using those accounting numbers and those routing numbers.
We have customers that aren’t in the country, and they like the fact that even though they’re not stateside with us they can still file their taxes conveniently with any device that has internet. One of the the way that we see the community members involvement in the software system is, prior to GovOS, we only had 88% of our customers paying online. Now we have about 98% of our customers paying online.
If someone else is looking for a solution for tourist tax, I would offer them advice of, find the company that’s willing to work for you and get you the items that you need to do your day-to-day task with tourist tax collection, tourist tax compliance.
I believe GovOS, the GovOS team, is fully prepared and capable of handling everybody’s collection needs.
