The Fulton County School Board got an update on tax collections and property values from county officials who have been hampered recently by the cyber attack on Fulton County’s data servers.
“I just came out of one of the remittance status meetings. And the county chairman just announced that we did not pay any ransom. And I will tell you that we are almost back to normal, we are probably 75 percent back to normal,” Tax Commissioner Arthur Ferdinand told the school board at its last meeting.
A countdown clock for a ransomware payment resurfaced on a website by the LockBit hacker group after Ferdinand visited the school board at its meeting last week, but the deadline passed on Feb. 29 with no release of data.
Going forward, Fulton County’s tax system will be hosted in the cloud, he said. He said normally it takes about six to eight months to transfer the system, but the county is doing it in about two weeks.
“Fortunately for us, before we were hacked, we had collected most of the money and so nobody was harmed,” Ferdinand said. “We have continued to collect money.”
The backlog of checks were to be posted and the county should soon be able to take payments by credit card again online, he said.
Ferdinand said that as of Jan. 31, its tax collection status was 96.52%. He said the county has collected $701.6 million out of the $727 million due in tax collections for Fulton County Schools.
Final collections for the previous tax year (2022) reached 99.5%. Tax collections for the previous two years reached 99.84%, he said.
Personal property market value rises
Chief Tax Appraiser Roderick Conley said the market value of personal property in Fulton County reached $217 billion in 2023. That was an increase from $173.3 billion in 2020.
The market value in the Sandy Springs tax district reached $25.7 billion in 2023. Out of all cities in Fulton County, only Atlanta had a higher market value at $106 billion.
The…
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