If You Tried Paying Your Dallas County Property Taxes Friday and Couldn’t, There’s Good News
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When former Dallas City Councilman Paul Fielding went online to pay his property tax bill that was due last Friday, he like thousands of other residents couldn’t. The sudden flood of traffic crashed the online payment site, sending Fielding and other taxpayers standing in line for hours in a hot, crowded office trying to meet a deadline without penalty.
“I have never seen such a catastrophic failure of a government system,” Fielding told CandysDirt.com.
Other residents shared his frustrations and took to the social media app Nextdoor to see what was happening — and to complain about the inconvenience and incompetence of the county tax office.
Here’s What Happened
News reports suggested the payment site outage occurred around 1 p.m. Friday and was corrected by 4:30 p.m. During that time residents were encouraged to pay their bills in person or possibly risk a 7% penalty for paying late.
Tax Assessor-Collector John Ames acknowledged that the payment system crashed and told us consideration would be given to those who tried to pay on Friday and were unable to do so. The online system was back up Friday afternoon following the brief outage, he said.
The payment system couldn’t handle the influx of at least 15,000 hits on the last day, although the tax assessor’s office advised residents to pay before the Jan. 31 deadline. Dallas County handles an estimated 900,000 property tax records, including those for the cities of Dallas, Irving, Garland, and the Park Cities.
‘Community Procrastination’
Ames said his office is taking action to ensure this doesn’t happen again.
“[The] system [was] overwhelmed with so many people trying to pay at once,” Ames said in a text message. “All good moving forward. Measures being put in place to increase capacity. Of course you know I am working with those affected.”
In a brief follow-up phone call, the tax assessor added that the outage was a result of “community procrastination,” people who waited until the last minute to pay when they had a four-month window to do so. More than 9,000 people were served in person on Friday, Ames said.
“Over 15,000 people went online to pay on the last day,” he said. “We always encourage people to pay at least two weeks prior to the deadline to avoid any issues. If we know that they attempted to pay, we’re going to let them pay as if it was on time. They just need to contact our office.”
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“Community procrastination.” You bet I’m going to hold on to my money until the last minute. Especially in these times.
Maybe they shouldn’t procrastinate and wait until the last second to pay their bill. Everyone had 4 months advance notice to pay their bill, yet many procrastinated and then want to make their problem DCAD’s problem. Of course those people don’t want to take any responsibility for their inaction.
I agree with LonestarBabs, that was a tacky response from the tax office. When smart people are required to pay anything that is a substantial amount of money…..we wait until the last minute possible because our money, like the percentage that is charged by the tax office for paying later than last Friday’s date, also draws interest for earnings. Why wouldn’t we ‘procrastinate?’ I call it monetary planning wisely.
When I couldn’t pay on Friday afternoon I just waited a couple of hours until the system came back up.I got and everything went perfectly.
Sounds like there was not only community Procrastination but community unnecessary stampeding to the tax office.
The take away is: if you’re going to procrastinate, do it right & don’t panic at the last minute.
With the cost of living higher than ever (groceries alone up 28%) not everyone has the luxury of paying ahead of time. My electric bill for December was the highest it has ever been. And agreeing with what others said, if you do have the money in an interest earning account, why give that up to the tax office?
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