Cook County property tax bills already on track to be at least one month tardy may arrive even later as controversial contractor Tyler Technologies’ upgrades to the countywide property tax systems are again running behind schedule, leading to mounting frustration and political fighting among county leaders.

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle’s office on Wednesday published the first of what is expected to be several reports detailing the technology delays and assigning blame for whether the fault lies with Tyler or with Assessor Fritz Kaegi, Treasurer Maria Pappas or Clerk Monica Gordon, the three county officeholders who handle property taxes.

Underscoring just how many problems remain to be fixed, the report noted the expected due dates for 105 issues that need to be resolved for the new computer system to be fully operational are still “TBD.”

Though it negotiated the original Tyler contract — which has been criticized for not initially holding Tyler accountable for repeated delays and missing numerous deadlines — Preckwinkle’s office in a statement pointed the finger at Tyler and the three other county offices for the problems. The county’s Bureau of Technology, which is overseen by Preckwinkle and has generally coordinated with the property tax offices over the years, does not have any listed responsibilities in the report.

In the statement, Preckwinkle’s office said it will continue to publish the project management reports generated by the county’s outside project management consultant, Guidehouse, “until all stakeholders have migrated” to the new system and property tax bills have been issued.

The report’s release comes as missed deadlines continue to slow scheduled upgrades to the county’s property tax computer systems and follow years of delays and other problems that were detailed in April by the Tribune and Injustice Watch.

For several years, property tax officials have criticized Tyler for failing to dedicate enough time or resources to the project, according to correspondence and interviews with the Tribune and Injustice Watch.

Pappas has been especially critical of Tyler’s handling of the upgrades and, in correspondence, has repeatedly urged Preckwinkle to fire the firm and sue them, describing it as “possibly the worst technology contract Cook County has ever written.”

Preckwinkle has held off on taking the firm to court and appeared to push back on the narrative Pappas has put forth by releasing a spreadsheet assigning several delayed items to the treasurer’s office. The Guidehouse management report designated the status of several items needed for the tech upgrade as “red” and noted the updates were “blocked until feedback from Treasurer is provided.”

In an emailed statement, Pappas spokesman Mike Puccinelli said the Guidehouse report is “merely a daily status report that does not provide the context necessary to understand the situation. The items listed as ‘blocked by the Treasurer’ are in fact blocked because Tyler Technologies could not implement them and now has inappropriately asked the Treasurer’s Office to omit essential functions from the new system — which the Treasurer is not willing to do.”

Puccinelli noted Preckwinkle’s office “bears responsibility for the timely launch of the project, which is now more than five years overdue,” adding that Preckwinkle’s office decided to not “keep the old mainframe running until the new system was fully functioning, despite our protestations.”

Sally Daly, a spokesperson for Clerk Monica Gordon, said in an emailed statement that the clerk’s office “welcomes and supports this initiative by the President to bring greater public transparency and agency accountability to what has been a very challenging transition process.”

The clerk is responsible for several “TBD” items on the list, though far fewer than Tyler or the treasurer.

“The Office remains fully committed to working with all stakeholders to complete this process in order to obtain a fully integrated and functional property tax system,” Daly said.

Tyler officials did not respond to a request for comment.

The Tribune and Injustice Watch reported in April on the decade-long troubled upgrade to the county’s property tax system. Problems led to yearslong delays, forcing the county to pay Tyler nearly $40 million and spend tens of millions more on outside consultants and contracts to maintain the outdated 1970s mainframe system Tyler was supposed to help replace.

County officials earlier this year said the system would go live and be fully launched shortly after Memorial Day, when the county treasurer and clerk’s offices moved much of their operations off of the old mainframe and onto Tyler’s new system. Instead, in late May, amid a growing list of “critical functions” that did not work during testing, the county officeholders decided to cancel the official launch.

After that decision, the list of critical problems to work through grew from nine to more than 60 by June 9, according to an internal county memo obtained by the Tribune and Injustice Watch. As several county officials involved in the process described it: Tyler “fixes one thing, breaks another.”

Preckwinkle said in a release Wednesday that the new “progress tracker” was being released so the public could “monitor, and hold accountable the shared commitment by Tyler Technologies and each of the Property Tax Stakeholders … to not only work together but also successfully upgrade to a new property tax-related computer system.”

Property tax bills were already slated to be at least a month late after a separate data problem at the assessor’s office delayed the transmission of key property tax data to the state. That issue, which also set off finger-pointing between the president, assessor, and Tyler, has since been resolved. It remains unclear how much longer bills will be delayed.

Delaying the new computer systems’ launch will likely throw taxpayers and elected officials further into a painful limbo as taxpayer refunds worth millions of dollars are currently on hold and government workers are working overtime to manually track incoming property data.

Pappas’ office last week estimated it was holding on to $52 million in tax refunds owed to roughly 22,000 taxpayers and $192 million in property tax payments that cannot be distributed to the county’s taxing bodies because of the holdup.

“We have no idea when we will be able to mail property tax bills because there is no system for issuing them,” Pappas wrote in a letter to Preckwinkle on June 27.

Since the county pulled its final set of data from the mainframe at the start of May in preparation for the switch over to the new system, County Assessor Fritz Kaegi’s office has also put the processing of “certificates of error” on hold. Those certificates are issued when a homeowner doesn’t receive an exemption to which they are entitled. Although Kaegi’s office has been using Tyler’s platform since 2021, the office stated that it cannot transfer data to the treasurer’s office until the treasurer adopts the new system. The assessor’s office has only a handful of to-do items on Guidehouse’s list.

Individuals can still apply for certificates, but they will not be processed until a later date, officials with the assessor’s office said.

County Clerk Monica Gordon’s staff has been working overtime to manually process more than 30,000 “transactions” — including bills, payments, postings and deeds — since May 2. That includes roughly 5,300 redemptions, where property owners can buy back late tax balances bought up by private entities.

When Tyler’s system is finally up and running, the clerk’s data about those recent bills will have to be manually typed into Tyler’s new system, creating the potential for additional errors.

Injustice Watch’s David Jackson contributed.