IT Blog Spotlights Arkansas Auditor E-filing Portal

State Auditor Charlie Daniels’ (D) office is receiving national attention for its progress in automating its Unclaimed Property (UCP) Division.

Information technology blog GCN.com spotlights the office for its new e-filing portal that has significantly streamlined the verification process for helping Arkansans reunite with lost property.

In the past, the service – which is promoted annually by the Great Arkansas Treasure Hunt – has been a labor-intensive, paper-reliant, manual claims process.

With a conversion to automation, the Auditor’s office now has an online service for searching and processing claims and it’s producing tremendous efficiencies.

From GCN.com:

Arkansas has collected some 300,000 individual unclaimed properties worth $31 million for fiscal year 2013. “You can imagine the intensive work required if you don’t have some sort of paperless claims process,” said Janet Harris, deputy auditor.

“We were consistently behind two months, sometimes three, with a small staff and operating budget that had not been increased in many years,” Harris said.

That has changed with the e-filing application developed by UCP’s Web developer, Arkansas.gov, a subsidiary of the National Information Consortium, and verification and authentication services from LexisNexis.

The online filing system, which went live March 20, has helped UCP achieve a 77 percent improvement over last year in the time it takes to pay applicants. Applicants now receive checks in seven days or fewer, as opposed to the weeks it took with the manual, paper-based process, Harris noted.

Since launching the portal – which you can access at this link – the Auditor’s office has seen a 34% increase in the average number of claims paid in a week and a 45% reduction in paper claims.

Read the GCN.com article here.