Welcome to Citizen Self Service

Transcription

1 Welcome to Citizen Self Service From this part of our site you can access information on your assessments, taxes you have paid and outstanding bills for your real estate, personal property and motor vehicle(s). If you choose to pay a bill online, you will eventually be taken to a third party site that The Town of South Windsor has no control over. If you need assistance with this site, support information will be available for you. Your credit card company processes payments immediately but our site may not reflect the payment for a few days.

2 This is the Citizen Self Service page. From now on we ll use CSS instead of Citizen Self Service. Any special announcements, such as changes, will appear on this page. The menu on the left lets you choose what section you want to use. In this discussion we will go over each section and how to use it to retrieve information. Each time you go to a section the menu will turn that button Grey, as the CSS button is now. Additional menu choices for the section you choose will appear below the grey button. Let s start with Real Estate

3 This is the Real Estate query page. Notice the menu. There are not a lot of choices yet. You would click the contact us to view the phone number and address for the tax office. We do not allow searching by name, to protect your privacy. Next, we will discuss some terms and concepts that may be unfamiliar or unclear to you, the public.

4 The first is Tax Year. Real Estate, Personal Property and Motor Vehicle taxes are assessed on Oct 1. The taxes based on the Oct. 1 assessment will be due the following year On July 1. So if your property was assessed on Oct 1, The bill you will receive for that will be due on July 1, The tax year is based on the assessment date. On your July 1, 2012 bill, the tax year is This term is very important and some people have trouble understanding the concept. Please read the paragraph as many times as you need to understand. Don t move on until you do. Real Estate taxes are divided into two equal payments. One is due on July 1 and the other is due on Jan 1. If we are speaking about the Oct 1, 2011 assessment. The first tax year 2011 payment is due on July 1, The second payment is due on Jan 1, 2013; which is still referring to tax year This can make things very confusing when you try to file your income taxes. In order to clarify, let s say you are filing your 2012 income taxes: Question: How much did I pay in Real Estate Taxes in 2012? To answer this, you need to know how much you paid for the January 2012 payment as well as the July 2012 payment. In order to find this information, you need to realize that although you made both payments in 2012, the January payment was actually for This means you will need to do 2 searches using 2 different tax years to determine what you paid in the 2012 calendar year. You will search the 2011 tax year and use the 2nd installment number. Then you will search the 2012 tax year and use the 1st installment number. If you add these two together, it will give you the total of what you paid in Real Estate Taxes in Answer: Add the previous tax year s 2nd installment to the current tax year s 1st installment. Sorry but you cannot search multiple years at once here.

5 Regardless of the search, the Tax Year MUST be filled in. The address and parcel id can be left blank, but there are over 11,000 parcels each tax year. It can take quite some time for ALL of those results to be returned. Therefore it is recommended that you include either the address or parcel id along with the tax year. A search done using the parcel id tends to be faster and will return results for just that parcel. Your parcel id can be found on one of your tax bills.

6 Let s do a search. We will do a search for the town hall which is at 1540 Sullivan Ave and we want to see the tax bill for So we enter the address and change the tax year to This search does not except wild cards (* or? or %) so for instance you don t know if its Sullivan Ave, Sullivan Avenue, Sullivan Drive etc You can search for Sullivan. The search is also not case sensitive. You can search Sullivan or sullivan or SULLIVAN and you will get the same result.

7 We are just using this as a visual example. Town owned properties are exempt from property taxes. But they have value and have an assessed value. They generate a record and a bill number. On the upper right of the bill listing is a View Payments/Adjustments link. If you click on that you will see any payments and/or adjustments that apply to the bill shown.

8 As I said, we are just using this for a visual. With no bill amount, there is no payment and nothing to adjust. But this is where you would find the payments you made and the date you made them. Remember if you are doing this for income tax purposes, watch the dates. Now we can click the Return to View Bill link or the View Bill button in the left menu.

9 Now that you have performed a search you will notice that the menu has several new selections. We will now look at each. First is charges and exemptions.

10 Charges and Exemptions If this was an actual billable account, the charges would show the assessed value, the mill rate and the total tax.

11 Property Detail This displays detailed info on the parcel. Some things you may be familiar with and others you may not be. Customer ID for example. This will not always be the same. You may see more than one. This is not critical. These screen shots came from a test system. We entered values for the town hall for testing purposes. In the live system the 2009 tax for this parcel would be $0.00

12 Owner Information This would be the owner of record on Oct 1 of the tax year. The address may be different from the property. And again the customer number. The owner could have many customer numbers. This is just one of them. As mentioned before, this is not critical.

13 Assessment This shows the assessment break down. The top part is the summary, the bottom is the detail breakdown. Again this is from the test system and the numbers should not be considered accurate.

14 Assessment History This screen shows the assessment going back a number of years.

15 Tax Rate This shows the tax rate for this particular bill. The program is set up to accept multiple tax rates. South Windsor only has one.

16 All Bills This screen shows all bills associated with this parcel.

17 The next three are simple. The Contact Us provides a phone number and address to reach us. The Search Results bring up the list from the last search you did. And the New Search brings up a blank search screen to perform a new search.

18 Now let s move on to Personal Property Taxes. Again, you MUST enter the Tax Year. For faster results, we recommend that you include one of the first three options as well as the tax year. If you search by name, you must use the name exactly as it appears on the tax bill.

19 View Bill On the upper right of the bill listing is a View Payments/Adjustments link. If you click on that you will see any payments and/or adjustments that apply to the bill shown.

20 Property Detail This displays detailed information on the parcel.

21 Property Values This is the list of your property values for the tax year you have searched.

22 The next three are simple. The Contact Us provides a phone number and address to reach us. The Search Results bring up the list from the last search you did. And the New Search brings up a blank search screen to a new search.

23 Now let s move on to Motor Vehicle Taxes. Again, you MUST put in the tax year. For your privacy, it is not possible to search by name. Therefore, you must search using your license plate number. ENTER THE TAX YEAR, NOT THE YEAR OF YOUR VEHICLE/MODEL YEAR OR THE CALENDAR YEAR.

24 When your information comes up, click on View Bill.

25 On the upper right of the bill listing is a View Payments/Adjustments link. If you click on that you will see any payments and/or adjustments that apply to the bill shown.

26 View Payments This screen shows payments and adjustments that apply to your bill.

27 Vehicle Detail This screen contains the information about your vehicle.

28 Charges & Exemptions This shows you any charges and/or exemptions associated with the vehicle and tax year that you searched.

29 Tax Rates This shows the current mill rate for South Windsor. The Mill Rate is the number of dollars per thousand dollars of assessed value.

30 Due to security issues, we are unable to show you screenshots of making a payment. If at any time you are having trouble making a payment, please contact Official Payments Corporation. Their contact information will be on the payment screens.