Jan. 8 grace period set for delayed tag, property payments as outage investigation continues
Published 12:00 am Thursday, January 4, 2024
- The Cullman County Revenue Commissioner’s website Wednesday afternoon.
County leaders are working with law enforcement to investigate the origin of a service interruption that temporarily halted the processing of payments remitted online to the Cullman County Revenue Commissioner’s office.
First identified on Christmas Eve, service has been since restored to the revenue office’s online payment processing site. The outage affected online payments of both tag and property taxes in the wake of service having been restored, the revenue office has extended payers a penalty-free grace period until Monday, Jan. 8, for payments that were due during the period from Dec. 24-29.
Officials are limiting the sharing of details as the investigation proceeds, citing caution over maintaining its integrity.
“The county’s investigation into the scope and impact of this incident remains ongoing, and will take some time to complete,” the county commission office explained to The Times in a statement Wednesday. “We are reviewing what happened with law enforcement authorities and leading cybersecurity experts. To protect the progress of our ongoing investigation, we have shared all the information related to the incident that we can at this time, but will keep the public informed as material updates are available.”
User services for the revenue office’s payment portal were restored by Dec. 29, 2023, ending a brief period during which taxpayers were compelled either to pay in person (or via mail) and await a handwritten receipt, or simply wait for the outage to end and remit their payments during the ensuing grace period.
“The county takes steps to protect its network; however unfortunately, sophisticated incidents like this are common,” the commission said in its statement. “Once the issue occurred, we responded immediately to contain and address the situation. Thanks to the diligent work of many County teams over the holiday, we securely restored our website, ending the temporary outage in a matter of days and allowing residents to quickly and easily renew their tags and property tax transactions online.”