Towns going paperless
New state law allows communities to issue, collect tax and other bills online
A new state law has opened the door to paperless invoicing for municipalities that were tied to bills sent by first-class postage, but now can issue a tax or excise bill with the click of a mouse.
This new freedom is still in its infancy, but the town of Hingham is well on board, having issued its first property tax bill electronically at the end of June. Collector Jean Montgomery said she likes to stay a step ahead of the curve and plans to send boat and motor vehicle excise bills electronically in the next few months as well.
Like tax collectors in a number of other communities south of Boston, Montgomery said she hopes eventually to have 100 percent participation by locals; to get the new system started, she said, residents first have to opt in. Meanwhile, the town will continue to send invoices the old-fashioned way so residents can still pay by cash or check.
“My goal is to stay on the forefront of these things and I didn’t want to be behind the other towns,’’ said Montgomery. “The goal is to do what we need to do to make sure these bills get paid.’’
On the Cape, Harwich and Brewster are also debuting paperless invoicing systems.
And the town of Easton hopes to launch a new electronic billing and collecting system by the start of the new year, having just closed a request for proposals in the initiative. Officials hope the system not only will cover the issuance of tax and other municipal bills, but also, eventually, may persuade residents to apply online for everything from construction permits to vacancies on local committees.
Easton Town Administrator David Colton said local officials are eager to get out from under the mountains of paper that result from issuing 94,000-plus bills a year in the community of 23,000 residents. It’s time to move into a server-based system where residents can pay online and also check their accounts and keep up with personal financial information from home, he said.
How the tide has turned since everyone took it for granted that all bills arrived in the mail, said Colton. Now, the town’s newest effort to lasso technology is meant not only to cut down on costs, but also to increase efficiency.
“The days of the Town Hall as we know it are numbered,’’ Colton said.
The paperless effort will save reams of paper, and pay for itself through a nominal service fee.
Initially, however, participation has to be voluntary, he said. “We hope people will take advantage of it.’’
And not a moment too soon, said Easton collector Teresa DeSilva, whose phone rings off the hook at tax time with residents trying to figure out how much they have already paid during the calendar year in which property taxes are due quarterly, or how much is still owed.
“Now they can check it themselves,’’ DeSilva said. “And the reduction in paper would definitely be a plus so we’re not spending time shuffling stacks of paper around the office.’’
Those who aren’t online at home can pull up their accounts on computers at the town library or at one installed in a kiosk at Town Hall, she said.
Paper invoices in the United States are responsible for 10 percent of all trees cut down worldwide, according to Paystream Advisors, a research and consulting firm. And creating them uses as much electricity each year as is consumed by 20 million households.
Further, a year’s worth of invoices take up as much landfill space as 10 football fields each stacked more than 100 feet deep with paper, according to the firm. Transferring even half of the nation’s paper invoice volume over to electronic documents can eliminate 12 billion pieces of paper and save almost 1 million trees, while reducing the carbon dioxide footprint by almost 250,000 tons, it says.
The trend toward paperless transactions began some 15 years ago with the airline industry and is now just beginning to take hold in municipalities, said Bob Bennett, chief executive officer of Invoice Cloud, which specializes in electronic invoicing.
Bennett, of Westwood, said the idea for the company came to him as he was paying his
“Their customer service portal was easy to use, and it occurred to me that lots of billers would like to have that functionality,’’ he said.
He said he knew he could put together a flexible infrastructure mirroring the bill a person receives in the mail that can be paid online for less than the cost of a stamp.
“But it’s not as easy as it sounds for a town to go paperless,’’ he said. A community needs five components in place for the system to work, he explained: e-mail notification; an exact, online replica of the bill; online payment capability; ease of navigation on the site; and a server synchronized with accounting software.
Up until February, a town was required to send a printed bill by first-class mail.
The new law will free up a town or city’s treasurer/collector from having to count pennies or handle checks, said Bennett, adding, “By creating a self-service portal, they can also handle customer service more efficiently.’’
Michele Morgan Bolton can be reached at mmbolton1@verizon.net. 
