The Record - Issue 19: Winter 2020

104 www. t e c h n o l o g y r e c o r d . c om P ROF I L ED : C ENT RO DE R E CAUDAC I ÓN DE I NGR E SOS MUN I C I PA L E S Taking action to recover revenue Puerto Rico’s CRIM used Truenorth’s Sunrise to deliver valuable data-driven insights and find new revenue during the global pandemic P uerto Rico’s Centro de Recaudación de Ingresos Municipales (CRIM) is responsi- ble for invoicing, receiving and distribut- ing the funds generated by property taxes for all municipalities of the Caribbean island. Its revenue streams have eroded during the pan- demic, and its disparate collection of systems cre- ated delays in gathering actionable intelligence. This meant that the agency was losing revenue opportunities to the point that it had collected less than a quarter of its potential income. To tackle this problem, CRIM fast-tracked the use of Truenorth’s Sunrise solution to eval- uate its systems, identify metrics, build a data warehouse that unified its many databases, and execute other supporting projects to realise its revenue objectives. The solution identifies paths to critical data that can be quickly leveraged, includes custom coding to create interfaces to legacy components, and then presents in them in an understandable way to allow the organisa- tion to address the erosion of revenue. Truenorth first reviewed CRIM’s billing system and its Esri Geographic Information System, along with a system for property appraisals and several Oracle and SQL databases. The results were compared to information from the census in 2010 and correlated with other agencies’ data. Sunrise analysed this data and uncovered multiple avenues for improvement. These included many undeliverable invoices due to incorrect addresses or contact information and a further set of invoices that had been returned. Furthermore, it was found that tens of thou- sands of properties across the island had been improved but not reappraised, with thousands of pools that made properties ineligible for a prop- erty tax exemption going unrecorded. Once the evaluation phase had been com- pleted, Sunrise introduced a new data ware- house architecture to integrate the data silos within the CRIM billing, appraisals and property mapping systems. Data management platform TimeXtender served as the repository for data from all other property tax-related databases and sources, providing over 200 pre-configured and certified connectors between systems. As a result, the project spent only two days in a proof- of-concept stage, with a further 15 days for the production system to integrate the data silos within CRIM’s systems and databases. Sunrise was then configured to produce data lineage and documentation to facilitate agency oversight. Data is now pulled nightly from all property tax systems into TimeXtender. That data is then organised and analysed to provide CRIM’s management and personnel with cus- tomised reports and dashboards. When they log into their accounts, employees immediately have access to Microsoft Power BI dashboards show- ing the data they need to provide their functions. These new insights allowed CRIM to recover $177 million in invoicing errors, $46 million in incorrect mailing address, $22 million in unre- alised property revenue, $7 million in incorrect exemptions, and $63 million in unapprised properties collectively allowing CRIM to gen- erate enough income from existing revenue sources to avoid a rise in property taxes. “Employees immediately have access to Microsoft Power BI dashboards showing the data they need”