Car tax errors taxing county workers

The Division of Motor Vehicles' $40 million Project Phoenix computer system has continued to bring problems to motorists, including tax issues that are causing lines to grow at Greenville County Square. JASON PARKER/Staff e-mail this story

First, counties sent car tax bills to dealers for thousands of leased cars. Then they sent bills that had the wrong owners' names. Bills went out that had shortened expiration dates.

Project Phoenix has struck again.

The Department of Motor Vehicles' $40 million Project Phoenix computer system has continued to bring problems to motorists, seven months after it was installed. The first problems with the leased vehicles have been solved, but errors are again rising dramatically, said Greenville County officials.

So while the lines at the DMV shrink, they're growing longer at Greenville County Square.

Just ask Meovena Scott who sat in disbelief at County Square this week while a county worker explained what a state computer did to her.

Her license plate is to expire in November, but the DMV sent her a notice saying it expired in January and sold her a new tag for $24. Then she got another tax bill from Greenville for two months worth of taxes to re-align her tax bill with her vehicle registration.

Scott made a special trip to pay the $16 in new taxes. She's fed up with the county and the state.

"I'm frustrated with everything," she said.

Mary Strom, Greenville County auditor, said the DMV's mistake is bad for the county's image.

"We look bad because I'm the person who has to tell her (Scott) she has to pay more taxes," she said.

As tensions rise with taxpayers, county workers say the hatred for the DMV is being dumped on them and the errors are sucking away time they could spend on people who have problems not created by a state computer.

"If it happened to us, we'd feel the same way," said Sandy Smith-Thornton, who works in the tax collector's office. "We stay calm and try to keep them calm."

Pickens County Auditor George Bryant said residents there have been affected as well.

"We keep hoping and praying every month that it will improve, but we're not seeing it," he said.

Sid Gaulden, spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety, the agency that operates the DMV, said the major problems have been solved and 90 percent of the new computer system works great. He said the state will have to go through an entire billing cycle before all of the problems are solved.

"When you plan a system like this, you outline what you want it to do and what you think it will do," he said. "It never works the way you think it will work."

The pressures are rising. Greenville County sends out about 30,000 auto tax notices each month, based on computer data it receives from the state. Strom said her office usually sees about 3,000 people asking for mileage discounts and other problems. Since the beginning of the year, her office has handled adjustments for an extra 1,000 people each month.

It's worse around the corner in the tax collector's office. Guyton Thompson, Greenville County's Tax Collector, said he used to receive a handful of erroneous tax notices each year. So far this year, he said he's seen a couple a day.

"I would guess that about 50 percent of the phone calls I take each day have something to do with the DMV," Thompson said.

Gaulden said a man in Charleston recently received two bills in two different months for cars he didn't own. That bug struck Greenville County Councilman Joe Dill when his wife opened a tax bill for a new Cadillac that she doesn't own.

"My wife got a tax notice for $744 in the name of someone else," he said. "She had a conniption. I had no idea that it was a problem with the state. I thought the county billed us improperly."

That's the typical response, county officials say, even though the county mails bills based on computer data it receives from the state. With 30,000 notices going out each month, the county can't check each bill, and that's frustrating for county workers like Bryant in Pickens who are bearing the brunt of the frustration.

"They're looking at us and saying, 'Well, why can't you get it right?'" he said.

Jason Zacher covers Greenville County and can be reached at 298-4272.