A long-delayed software upgrade designed to liberate Cook County’s tax offices from a decades-old computer mainframe will be delayed by at least another nine months, county technology officials told disgruntled commissioners on Wednesday. And in the meantime, officials suggested the tumultuous switch could put the county’s tax bills in jeopardy.

The county Board of Commissioners approved a $29 million contract in 2015 with Texas-based Tyler Technologies to upgrade the offices of the Clerk, Assessor, Treasurer and Board of Review to the iasWorld system with the goal of streamlining property tax assessments, appeals, rate calculations and bill collections.

The county has been under contract for a parallel switchover of the Circuit Court Clerk’s office to Tyler's Odyssey case management system — a process beset by its own delays and setbacks. And the offices of the State’s Attorney and Chief Judge are not on track to fully break free of the archaic mainframe system until at least 2024, officials said during budget hearings last week.

Tyler had originally vowed to complete the switchover to iasWorld by summer 2020. But after encountering logistical hurdles, they pushed back their completion deadline to the end of 2022.

But that still won't be enough time to get the new software fully up and running across all the offices, county Deputy Chief Information Officer Derrick Thomas said during a meeting of the county board’s Technology and Innovation Committee. Officials are now "shifting things out" to aim for completion in September 2023, Thomas said.

"I know that this project has certainly taken longer than any of us had hoped, but I also believe there has been good progress," Chief Information Officer Tom Lynch said. "I can stand here today with great confidence that we will meet the timelines that Derrick walked through."

Thomas noted that the county hired the technology consulting firm Gartner in late 2019 to conduct an audit of the Tyler switchover, and the probe found that abandoning the plan would only leave the county on the hook for millions of dollars with no better options to upgrade its tech infrastructure.

"I think we all can say we’ve been frustrated and there have been delays, so we wanted to explore options," Thomas said. "Ultimately, the decision was made by each elected official…to stay the course and to move forward with Tyler."

Thomas blamed the latest delay on "four key drivers:" matching the technology to each office's documents, delays by Tyler to custom-build each office's database, more time needed for "user testing" and the county's “property tax cycle constraints."

Mark Hawkins, president of the Appraisal & Tax Division at Tyler, spoke up on Monday to “state Tyler's commitment to Cook County in this project, and my personal commitment to this project.”

“Any delay we don’t take lightly — we don’t like it [more than] you do,” Hawkins said. “We feel good that we’re on a good pace now. So while we’re talking about a delay, we don’t anticipate we’ll be coming back a year from now and saying something different.”

But Comm. Sean Morrison (R-17) was not satisfied with those answers, saying he was “still not understanding why” the project had to be delayed twice.

“If nobody can directly tell us why, how can we make a reasonable assumption that we’re going to be on track two-and-a-half years from now?” Morrison said. “That’s a very worrisome position to be in.”

Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas wrote in an Oct. 1 letter to Hawkins that Tyler had shown just 17 of 246 “developed requirements” for the next live demonstration of a new tax collection system — a delay she blamed on “Tyler’s nonchalance on its work with us.”

The live demonstration “has been postponed due to Tyler development’s inability to produce a functioning product with the County’s specification,” Pappas wrote. “How can this be? Tyler knew the County’s specs when it bid on the contract, yet cannot deliver on them today!”

Treasurer’s Office Chief Information Officer David Byrnes echoed Pappas’ frustration on Wednesday but struck a somewhat more optimistic tone, saying the latest project manager Tyler assigned to work with the office “has been a solid partner.”

“That is a step in the right direction, but we cannot let up and take our foot off the gas for any of this,” Byrnes said. “We have to meet those goals and meet those deadlines.”

Tanya Anthofer, who oversees tax rate calculations in county Clerk Karen Yarbough’s office, said her office is “very disappointed with this most recent delay” but “hopeful that this new plan is much better than the previous plans we’ve had.”

“The Clerk’s Office is still committed to the success of this project,” Anthofer said. “But success will not happen without a firm commitment from Tyler to correct the errors of the past and to provide some adequate resources…for all aspects of this project.”

Sarah Garza Resnick, chief of staff for Assessor Fritz Kaegi, was more upbeat on the switch, describing discovering “walls and walls of paper” dominating the office when Kaegi took office at the end of 2018.

“We’ve developed a very strong relationship with Tyler, knowing how critical us going live with this product was to deliver on the transformation that Assessor Kaegi promised,” Resnick said. “And I am so proud that this team has delivered.”

The Assessor’s office went live with the new iasWorld system for calculating tax assessments in February. Kaegi has repeatedly lauded the upgrade as an improvement that will eventually save the office time and money, but the transition has “been very, very challenging” and set back the office’s assessment schedule, Resnick said Wednesday.

Assessor’s office employees still have to feed information back into the old mainframe using a little-known coding language, a process Resnick described as “like feeding a fussy toddler.”

The office had by Wednesday mailed out assessments to property owners in 35 of the county’s 38 townships and finalized appeals data for 15 townships, Resnick said Wednesday. But Kaegi’s team has yet to deliver any data to the Board of Review — a delay that Board of Review leaders have warned will put extra strain on their staffs and ultimately force tax bills to go out late.

Comm. Peter Silvestri (R-9) asked for assurances that implementation of the Tyler software will not delay property tax collections, an outcome he called a “disaster” that could force municipalities and school districts to take out short-term loans to cover their costs.

“If we don’t get those tax bills out, everybody suffers from that,” Silvestri said. “There’s not going to be one commissioner that’s going to be happy when they start getting calls from their mayors and school board presidents that the tax bills didn’t go out on time.”

But Resnick said she could not promise next year’s tax bills will not be delayed.

“We have been working through the system as fast as we can and have been completing the work within our office,” she said. “I do understand the Board of Review’s work is contingent on us getting the files…and we have been working around the clock to be able to do that.”

William O’Shields, chief deputy commissioner for the Board of Review, said Silvestri’s question is already answered.

“If the objective is for a July mail date with an August due date, I honestly think that window is closed, given where we are currently,” O’Shields said.