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Tax-processing equipment not ready for 2000 Source: St. Petersburg Times

Despite 18 months of preparation, Hillsborough Tax Collector Doug Belden will not have of all his tax-processing equipment ready for the new millennium when the calendar rolls over to 2000. A high- speed remittance processor, a $150,000 refrigerator-sized machine that handles tax bills and payments, is not yet ready to deal with the 2000 computer bug problem. Now it's too late to fix it before the end of the year. With the flood of tax payments that begin each November, tax collection officials can't afford to take the device out of commission to upgrade it. The hope is that the processor can be taken off-line and get the required $67,000 upgrade in January, when the volume of mailed tax payments dwindles. The computer bug problem, also known as Y2K, is the term applied to the problem posed by computers that recognize yearly dates in two digits, such as "99." In the year 2000, or Y2K, such computers will be unable to differentiate the year 2000 from 1900. Several county government agencies have been meeting jointly to share information about the challenge. Hillsborough Property Appraiser Rob Turner decided to buy a new $2.8-million computer system to help prepare for the millennium bug. The Hillsborough Sheriff's Office budgeted an additional $200,000 for computer programmers' overtime to deal with the problem. But Belden's office decided not to share information with the Y2K task force. "We asked them to participate to see how they were coming along with the Y2K situation," said Pete Watkins, the Y2K coordinator for the County Commission. "I think they came to our first meeting, but we never got anything from them." Belden's officials maintain, however, that tax collections are not falling behind and that no unnecessary overtime is being paid to deal with unmet computer bug problems. "We are operational and everything looks good as far as Y2K," said Preston Trigg, Belden's director of administration. "We've been working on this for over a year and a half. We've finished the major stuff. We're left with the remittance processor and the smaller stuff. "At no time has any of the tax collection process been threatened." Asked about the cost of making the office's IBM mainframe computer Y2K-compliant, Trigg estimated the expense at $1-million. But Phil Ashley, Belden's director of information services, corrected that number, saying the mainframe upgrade was done as part of the normal maintenance contract, and cost about $25,000. Trigg said occasional night and weekend duty for tax collection employees has been normal this month and not caused by millennium bug problems. Total office overtime last year added up to about $10,400 every two weeks, according to Al Castano, Belden's accounting manager. Castano said he would not know until Monday whether overtime for office employees is higher so far this November than in previous years. Friday, Belden's officials were wrestling with another technical problem apparently unrelated to the office's year 2000 computer bug. On Thursday, the Hillsborough tax collector's official Web site went down and stayed down. Ashley, the information services director, initially had no explanation why the Web site went out of service. By Friday afternoon, he had traced the problem to the company that administers the tax collector's domain name server, the link that allows computer users access to the Web page. "We've been calling them to get it fixed," Ashley said Friday afternoon. ''But we keep getting busy signals."- Times staff writer Jeff Testerman can be reached at (813) 226-3422. His e-mail address is testerman@sptimes.com.

-- eggman (LittleNicola@bluejayway.com), November 15, 1999

Answers

Hi eggman-

Do they also call you the Walrus?

Did ya ever meet "Taxman?"(I Think George Harrison wrote that:" Let me tell you how it will be: there's one for you, nineteen for me;cause I'm the Taxman, yeahhhhI'm the Taxmannnnnn....and you're working...for no one...but me - ")A good song.

Take care

-- doorbaby(takin' a break) (tomG@heaven.com), November 15, 1999.

Link?

-- Link (ple@s.e), November 16, 1999.