Tax Collections Go High-Tech | Hopedale firm takes 125 Massachusetts municipalities into 21st Century with new technology
On the face of it, “deputy tax collector” sounds like an old-fashioned job. And in some ways it is. Deputy collectors, hired by cities and towns as independent contractors to collect past-due taxes, must knock on doors, leave warning notices and track down people who might prefer not to be found.
But these days, the job is also highly dependent on modern technology. And that has allowed a Hopedale company that’s far from a mom-and-pop operation to grab the deputy collector job in 125 Massachusetts communities.
Kelley & Ryan Associates, which now has about 45 full-time employees, was established in 1994 when two families that had been in the deputy collector business since the 1970s decided to join forces. CFO Richard Fitzgerald said the move was motivated partly by legal changes.
Prior to the late 1980s, he said, deputy collectors could arrest tax delinquents who refused to pay up. The state got rid of that power, and as an alternate means of enforcement, in the early 1990s it passed a law preventing offenders from renewing their drivers licenses and registrations. The systems that towns used to keep track of tax dodgers and communicate with the state Registry of Motor Vehicles went digital, leaving some small-time deputy collectors unable or unwilling to keep up.
“Once the computerization came along … lots of those one-person ones closed,” Fitzgerald said.
Kelley & Ryan quickly started taking over for those who retired or quit. And, in some cases, the company also replaced predecessors who weren’t looking to leave the business.
The Worcester Contract
In Worcester, for years three men split the deputy collector job. Then, in 2006, the city decided to seek bids for the position, to see if it could find a better deal.
Two of the men, George Valery III and Tim Cronin, formed a corporation to make a bid for the contract.
The city decided to split the work between them and Kelley & Ryan, but Valery and Cronin ended up pulling out of the deal, leaving the Hopedale company with the entire contract.
Treasurer Michael Conrad said the city has been happy with the work the company has done since it took over at the start of 2007.
“We did recently see an increase in our collections,” Conrad said. “We’re assuming it’s because of the deputy collectors. But we also see an increase in customer service. When an individual calls over to a much larger firm they get somebody on the phone who tries to walk them through the actual situation.”
Conrad also praised the ease of making payments with Kelley & Ryan, which allows online payment.
But Richard Tartaglia, an Ashland deputy tax collector who serves seven Massachusetts communities with a small staff, argues that there are minuses as well as pluses to a large-scale operation like Kelley & Ryan.
“You must keep up with technology, but you also have to know your area too,” he said. “It’s almost a double-edged sword.”
Tartaglia has made major technological advances over the years, even studying computer science at Framingham State College to develop his own software for the company. Even so, he said, he and his employees spend plenty of time knocking on doors.
“The biggest part of my job is finding people,” he said.
At Kelley & Ryan, Fitzgerald said, much of the door-to-door work of leaving notices at tax evaders’ homes is done by subcontractors, typically hired temporarily during the busy summer season.
Booming Business
Even as the delinquent-tax pie gets split up in different ways, it’s also growing in total size. Tartaglia said that when he started in the business in 1972, getting 300 warrants a year from Ashland would be a lot. Now, he said, getting 1,500 or 1,700 is not uncommon. The reason, he said, is that people are more mobile. That means a tax bill may not find its way to a recipient’s current address, and he may not even know about it until it’s past due.
The increased mobility of the state’s population is also one of Kelley & Ryan’s selling points. Because the company works for so many towns, Conrad said, if it finds a delinquent taxpayer in Brockton who also owes money in Worcester, it can demand that he pay both bills.
That same kind of economy of scale also extends to parking tickets. Fitzgerald said Kelley & Ryan collects parking fines for 60 Massachusetts communities, mostly overlapping the ones where it is the deputy collector.
In fact, Fitzgerald said, the parking ticket business is where the company is really primed to take off. It will probably continue to pick up deputy collector contracts in various communities, but because of differences in state law, it probably won’t expand that business beyond Massachusetts.
Parking tickets, on the other hand, are more similar all over. And Fitzgerald argues Kelley & Ryan has a unique piece of technology that will help it expand in that market. The hand-held devices it now gives out to ticket-writers in three communities, Worcester, Pittsfield and Salem, can communicate live with a server in the main office.
That means the people writing the tickets have access to data about any other outstanding bills associated with a license plate number.
Fitzgerald said the company is now tweaking the device’s software and hopes to begin expanding its use into new markets next year.
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