Richmond County residents are still wait‑ing for their 2025 personal property tax bills, which normally would have been mailed in the fall and due the first week of December.

The months‑long delay is reportedly tied to the county’s transition to a new software system, a process that has taken far longer than expected. According to updates from Commissioner of the Revenue Jennifer Gomer and county administrator Hope Mothershead, the transition has required extensive manual work to reconcile data before bills can be issued.

Concerns About Close Tax Cycles

In March, with the bills already months late and not expected to go out until April, mem‑bers of the Board of Supervisors expressed growing concern that the delayed 2025 per‑sonal property tax cycle was beginning to overlap with preparations for the 2026 cycle.

It is now the season for forms to be sent out for reporting personal property for 2026. Additionally, there is the prospect of residents being billed for 2025 and 2026 too close together.

“I’d hate for somebody to pay personal property taxes twice within a six‑month period,” said Supervisor J.R. Fidler.

During the March discussion, Mothershead explained that the transition involves a labor‑intensive process of manually review‑ing thousands of accounts, verifying DMV imports, and preparing data for the new RDA system. She said that once the information is successfully loaded into the software, how‑ever, the process can proceed quickly, with bills likely to be printed and mailed within 24 hours.

April Update

In an April 8 update to the Board of Supervisors, the Commissioner of the Revenue reported that her office had completed roughly 4,400 of the county’s nearly 6,000 active per‑sonal property accounts. About 1,600 accounts still required manual calculation and review.

Her goal, she wrote, was to finish those remaining accounts “by the end of next week,” followed by final error checks before turning the data over to the Treasurer’s Office. From there, the plan was for the data to be loaded into the system, for advance payments to be applied, and bills printed—assuming no unex‑pected software issues.

“We’ve got to know that this is the first go of billing with the system and there could be hiccups. It’s just—it’s what we deal with in an electronic world,” Mothershead told the Board in March.

Gomer also noted that while her office was working to finish the overdue 2025 bills, the 2026 personal property forms had already been mailed on March 23 and are due back by May 1. Those forms have been returning in mass amounts, she said.

This month, Mothershead said staff in the Treasurer’s Office is now assisting walk‑ins in the Commissioner of the Revenue Office so Gomer and her staff can stay focused on the property tax bills backlog.

By the end of last week, the remaining 1,600 calculations had not been completed as hoped. On Friday, Mothershead said staff now expect the calculations to be finished by the first part of this week.

Asked whether the county has received help from the software company for the tran‑sition, Mothershead confirmed that they are getting that assistance. “That will be the next step prior to printing the bills,” she said.

Although this conversion began in the fall, Mothershead reiterated that there are many phases involved in the software switch to allow departments to share information and work together smoothly.