City’s Finance Department Reports Significant Progress in Eliminating Tax Payment Processing Backlogs – Our City

Finance Commissioner says late fees appearing online are waived for payments posted before August 5

Finance Commissioner Brad O’Connor announced that the City of Syracuse Department of Finance has settled more than half of the tax payments delayed by a processing system error. The Ministry expects all payments to be processed by the end of August.

Although late fees have appeared online for payments affected by the delay, the Department says the fee will be waived before it is assessed by owners. The processing delay affected approximately 10,000 first term school and property tax payments made by mail. This was caused by an incorrect numeric code on the payment stubs used for automated processing.

“We apologize for this error. For payments by mail, we have allocated additional human resources to payment processing,” said Commissioner O’Connor. “We have made significant progress and will have settled all payments and waived late fees by the end of the month.”

The Finance Department has drawn up a processing plan to avoid any delays in payments made by post in the coming quarters. Online and in-person payments are not affected. The Department is also establishing new protocols to avoid the error that caused the first quarter processing delay, O’Connor said.

The Syracuse Common Council Finance Committee will be holding a meeting regarding tax backlogs on Thursday, August 26.