County staff report recurring problems with CIC software that slow tax certification and reporting

County staff told the Geary County Commission that persistent, intermittent problems with the CIC county software are slowing tax certification and other daily processes and require frequent trouble tickets and programming fixes.

A staff member summarized the immediate problem: "This morning, Vanessa went to certify personal property and it just didn't work," the staff member said, describing a file-size or data-size error that prevented running certification reports until programming intervened.

Staff described a pattern of frequent small failures—reports that fail to pull, strict CSV-format requirements for mortgage imports, and occasional reports pulled in the wrong tax year. One meeting participant raised concerns about CIC’s change in ownership and whether the vendor has the top-level capacity to support its customer base: "I would be concerned about the status of the company as a whole," the participant said, urging the county to review the vendor’s technology and long-term viability.

Commissioners and staff discussed mitigations: quarterly escalation calls with the assigned contact (Christy Jacobs), attending the vendor symposium and user groups to share workarounds, submitting enhancement requests by the vendor’s May deadline, and training county staff to reduce user errors. Staff reported some successful enhancements have been implemented in response to county requests, and that on-site vendor visits (abstract sessions) can accelerate fixes.

Why it matters: The problems affect tax certification, abstracts and other county processes that are time-sensitive and often occur annually, requiring staff to spend extra time and sometimes wait for vendor programming to restore functionality.

Details and clarifications: Staff said about 60–65 counties use the product; this was given as an approximate figure. The transcript records multiple examples of manual workarounds (special CSV formats and per-mortgage-company spreadsheets), the need to rebuild some county-specific fields (TIF/NRP inserts), and that some errors were user-process issues (reports pulled in the wrong year). The county’s recommended next steps were submitting enhancement requests, documenting trouble tickets, and continuing cross-county peer learning.

Provenance: Staff descriptions of the certification failure, file-size issue, mortgage import formats, training and enhancement processes occurred during the meeting’s CIC discussion.