The Comptroller of Maryland, Brooke Lierman, has announced that the agency’s internal tax processing system has been restored on Monday, March 13. The system was offline for a week, starting from Monday, March 6, causing a backlog of tax returns, refund requests, and direct debit requests. The staff is currently working expeditiously to process the backlog and expects to be fully up-to-date by Wednesday, March 22.
In a statement, Lierman expressed her gratitude towards the Comptroller’s Office staff and the IT Division, including the new Chief Information Officer, Robert O’Connor, for their hard work and dedication to restoring the essential system. She also apologized for the inconvenience the service outage caused and emphasized the need for the agency to modernize and update its legacy IT systems to improve the services offered.
“This systems outage highlights the need for the Office of the Comptroller to modernize and update our legacy IT systems – some decades old – in order to improve the services offered by our agency, a key recommendation of the my Transition Team,” Lierman said. “As your Comptroller, I am committed to the principles of transparency and accountability and will always do my best to provide updates on our efforts to ensure incidents like these do not happen again.”
The Comptroller’s Office processes and collects Maryland’s taxes, including personal income, corporate income, sales and use, and tobacco and alcohol taxes.