September 10, 2009 07:44 AM UTC

How to raise more tax revenue - a lot

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• by: DavidThi808

I was talking to a programmer the other day. He was working on a project for a county in Iowa and they kept hitting problems where the numbers were not adding up right. This was a central system for handling property taxes and so getting the dollars correct was key.

They finally figured out the problem, and in so doing increased the total valuation of property in the County by 100 million. It led to a significant increase in property taxes collected.

What did they do? They changed the password on the database so that only 1 person could change values in it. That was then tied to the software which required several people to approave any changes.

It turns out that employees at the county would go in to the database and lower the valuation of property owned by them and their close friends. About 20+ people knew the password for full access so across those 20 people, it was a lot of mark downs.

What he said was really interesting is everyone claimed that no one was doing this. But boy did they howl when the password was changed. And clearly the practice was widespread.

I wonder how many people can (and are) doing the same thing here? The question is not who officially has read/write access to the databases holding this info, but how many actually do.

And I would guess that like Iowa this is handled county by county. In which case odds are pretty good that in some counties access to the data is pretty widespread.