Vivian Gosnell, a supervisor in the Tax Assessor’s Office of Horry County, South Carolina, doesn’t mince words when describing how using Thomson Reuters CLEAR has changed the workflow in her office.
“CLEAR has been a tremendous help to us — definitely giving us more hits than misses,” she said, adding that the database is used daily in her office to find other possible addresses, rental properties, vehicles and other assets of the taxpayers of Horry County, which encompasses a coastal area of the state and includes the city of Myrtle Beach.
Sometimes her office would even find available residential discounts that taxpayers weren’t aware they were entitled to, Gosnell says, adding that CLEAR has helped her agency limit the number of letters sent out to collect back taxes, resulting in a cost and time savings to the county. “Before CLEAR, we just relied on what we had in our system, and it resulted in nothing even remotely close to what CLEAR provides us with now.” She estimates that since the time Horry County began using the database in July 2016, she has collected close to $2 million in incremental tax revenue than would have been possible without using CLEAR.
“It gets right to the person I am looking for and really cuts down on the guess work,” she explains. “It’s a great tool to have.”
