Review these tell-tale signs that your municipality is missing out on critical tax revenues—and learn how to fix it fast.
Sometimes, it’s easy to identify a revenue leak. There’s a steady, annoying drip-drip-drip of funds draining away your budget’s potential. But at other times, leaks aren’t quite so obvious. Revenue leaders might suspect there’s a problem but lack the time or resources to do the research needed to identify the source.
Scan our checklist to review the ways your municipality might be losing out on money. If you check at least one box, Azavar can help. You can also download a free PDF of the checklist here:
Revenue Reveal Checklist
- Have your municipal boundaries changed? Did your community annex any land? Did you fail to see a commensurate revenue increase with your expansion? If that sounds familiar, you just might be missing out on miscoded properties.
- Has your community added new homes and businesses? It could be that your new construction didn’t come with the revenue boost. Your taxes and fees may not be getting collected from these new locations.
- Do you suspect you are overpaying for energy or telecommunications services? Maybe you’ve compared notes with other revenue leaders, or perhaps you’ve watched bills tick up over the years, but you just don’t have the team needed to discern what rates you should be paying.
- Do you receive franchise fees from utilities, but don’t know if they’re accurate? You wouldn’t be the first municipal leader to be stumped by these inscrutable payments—in fact, utility companies and their lobbyists design them to be overly complex and confusing.
- Do you suspect USPS address data doesn’t reflect the right community? This happens all the time, where the postal service uses ZIP codes to assign mailing addresses to one community when they are really located in another. That data then gets used by utility providers to collect and allocate taxes and fees away from you.
- Are you earning every penny from complex cable agreements? There are a lot of different ways you might be losing out on revenue if you’re not looking at gross operating revenue, including supplementary spending from areas such as advertising and home-shopping channel purchases.
- Do you know if all businesses are remitting taxes equitably? As industries evolve, new players come into the market and change how business functions and invariably expose loopholes in your tax collection efforts. Level the playing field for your business community while gaining incremental revenue for your community.
- Does your team find it impossible to stay on top of short-term rentals? Some communities still lack ordinances around short-term rentals that generate taxes or fees, but even those that do have trouble managing the 24 different platforms that offer short-term rentals.
- Do you have a dedicated resource skilled in the intricacies of lodging data on staff? Don’t worry—very few municipalities do. But hidden in these facts and figures is lost revenue from incremental charges and fees, misreported exemptions and other issues.
- Are you able to catch every remittance error? The answer is: no, of course not. Because you’re only human and only have so much time and so many staff. Every municipality loses money due to errors.
Are your ready to maximize revenues without impacting your budget?
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All of these are very common ways that result in municipalities missing out on much-needed revenue. The end result is an anemic budget and service cuts.
Azavar has more than two decades of experience helping communities like yours conduct thorough reviews of all sources of revenue—both actual and potential.
Our revenue discovery system will identify those leaks and restore revenue to your community. In fact, our contingency-based fee model means that we work for free and ONLY get paid if we recover funds for your community.
Let’s Start Talking
We’ve been trusted partners of municipalities for more than 25 years, fighting hard for every dollar so civic leaders can deliver more services for vibrant communities. The Azavar team is excited to offer you and your staff our rigorous analysis, peerless technology solutions, and concierge-style consultation and service to realize your goals. Maximize your revenue and compliance today.
Download your free revenue reveal checklist