Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Defect in Treasurer's online system

Today I wanted to look up a property in Woodstock to see its tax bill and ownership information.

Easy-peasy, right? All you do is go to www.mchenrytreasurer.org and search by the property address. Right?

Wrong.

According to online records, "No parcels found." Now that's strange. I had just driven by the property yesterday. It was there. Should I drive by today and see if the property vanished in the middle of the night? Will there be just a hole there? How deep does a hole have to be, not to have a P.I.N.?

A phone call to McHenry County Treasurer Bill LeFew's office solved part of the problem. The property tax bill is mailed to a P.O. Box.

As if that is a good reason not to find the tax information online after a search for Property Address. A computer system can easily be written to allow searches to include both physical and mailing addresses. That's Computer Programming 101.

If you think that search results should include properties which have tax bills mailed to P.O. Boxes, if you enter a street address, call Bill LeFew at 815.334.4260

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