Swampscott launches tax system online

SWAMPSCOTT – The Taxman cometh – and now electronically, as the town has launched a system for residents to view and pay their taxes online.”It will make it easier customer-service wise,” Treasurer / Collector Denise Dembkoski said Wednesday. “It’s more flexible and gives us more options. In addition, it will be available 24/7, 365 days a year, with (up-to-date) interest shown.”Dembkoski said it will also enable residents to pay taxes by credit card.”We get that question all the time,” she said.The system is a partnership with Invoice Cloud, Inc., which Dembkoski said developed the software and is the secure payment processing center.The system went live on Dec. 30 and can be accessed by clicking on the ?online payments’ button on the Town of Swampscott website. Dembkoski said residents can currently use the system to pay their real estate and personal property taxes. Users will be able to pay motor-vehicle excise taxes by the end of January and water and sewer bills when they are sent out in February, she added.Dembkoski said the system offers several benefits to taxpayers.The town’s previous online bill pay system only allowed residents to pay current real-estate taxes. But she said the new system allows residents to pay past-due bills – as the system calculates and adds interest – and also gives the resident an online version of their bill and their payment history.”When coming to tax time, we always get the question of how much they paid last year,” Dembkoski noted.Residents can also schedule payments and set up automatic payments with the system, she said, and the system sends email reminders as due dates approach.Dembkoski said residents must provide an email address and an identifying piece of information – for instance, an address if paying real-estate taxes – to register and use the system.Residents will be charged 40 cents to pay by electronic check and will be charged 2.95 percent of the bill if they use a credit card, she said. The service costs the town $720 a year, she wrote in an email.Selectman David Van Dam said he appreciated any effort to make things easier for residents.”I think government should make things easier for people and this is a perfect example,” he said. “This gives people the ability to do it on their time.”Cyrus Moulton can be reached at [email protected].