[Checklist] Is your municipality missing out on critical tax revenue?
1. Revenue Reveal
Checklist for Local
Governments
Scan our checklist to review the ways your
municipality might be losing out on money.
If you check at least one box, Azavar can help.
2. Have your municipal boundaries changed?
Did you fail to see a commensurate revenue
increase with your expansion? If that sounds
familiar, you just might be missing out on
miscoded properties.
3. Has your community added
new homes and businesses?
It could be that your new construction
didn’t come with the revenue boost.
Your taxes and fees may not be getting
collected from these new locations.
4. Do you suspect you are overpaying
for energy or telecommunications
services?
Maybe you’ve compared notes with other local
finance leaders, or perhaps you’ve watched bills
tick up over the years, but you just don’t have
the team needed to discern what rates you
should be paying.
5. Do you receive franchise fees from
utilities, but don’t know if they’re
accurate?
You wouldn’t be the first municipal leader to
be stumped by these inscrutable payments—
in fact, utility companies and their lobbyists
design them to be overly complicated and
confusing.
6. Do you suspect USPS address data
doesn’t reflect the right community?
This happens all the time, where the postal
service uses ZIP codes to assign mailing
addresses to one community when they are really
located in another. That data gets used by utility
providers to collect and allocate taxes and fees
away from you.
7. Are you earning every penny from
complex cable agreements?
There are a lot of different ways you might be
losing out on revenue if you’re not looking at
gross operating revenue, including
supplementary spending from areas such as
advertising and home-shopping channel
purchases.
8. Do you know if all businesses are
remitting taxes equitably?
As industries evolve, new players come into the
market and change how business functions and
invariably expose loopholes in your tax
collection efforts. Level the playing field for
your business community while gaining
incremental revenue for your community.
9. Does your team find it impossible
to stay on top of short-term
rentals?
Some communities still lack ordinances around
short-term rentals that generate taxes or fees,
but even those that do have trouble managing
the many different online platforms that offer
short-term rentals.
10. Do you have a dedicated resource skilled in
the intricacies of lodging data on staff?
Don’t worry—very few municipalities do. But
hidden in these facts and figures is lost
revenue from incremental charges and fees,
misreported exemptions and other issues.
11. Are you able to catch every remittance
error?
The answer is: no, of course not. Because
you’re only human and only have so much
time and so many staff. Every municipality
loses money due to errors.
12. For questions or inquiries, contact an Azavar representative
by email sales@azavar.com or visit us at www.azavar.com