The Itat Quarterly

Fiscal Year 2025 - Q2 Edition
Welcome to The ITAT Quarterly!
The ITAT Quarterly newsletter is brought to you by the county treasurers of IowaTaxAndTags.org. It is designed to increase communications and provide treasurers with information on hot-topic issues that concern Iowa county treasurers.
As we move from fall into the winter season, I am pleased to share another edition of the ITAT Quarterly. In this quarter, we are excited to release updates that make managing county payments even easier, including the rollout of new user accounts and a scheduled payments feature. These tools will allow for greater flexibility and convenience in handling our citizen’s property tax and vehicle renewal payments.
In this newsletter, you’ll find a fun spotlight on one our ITAT developers, an update on major initiatives, and a list of important upcoming dates.
Wishing you a very happy holiday season and a wonderful New Year!
Thank you for taking the time to read the ITAT Quarterly!
County Treasurer Spotlight - Developer Takeover
Sarika Mandumula, ITAT Senior Applications Developer
Get to Know a Member of the ITAT Development Team
Q: How long have you been with the county?
A: I have been with the county for a little over 10-years.
Q: What is your current roll with the county? What inspired you to pursue this career?
A: I am a Sr. Applications Developer and I was referred to this opportunity by a friend/colleague, who was also a county employee. I had heard great things about working for the government and loved the idea of doing my share to give back to my community.
Q: What type of education did you need for your current roll with the county?
A: For my current roll, it was important to have a degree in computer science with 5+ years of experience in software development. When I joined I was a Computer Science major graduate with 10+ years of experience in software development.
Q: Prior to joining the county, what did you do?
A: Before joining the county, I was working as a developer at John Deere. I worked on developing a mapping software for farmers that would automate seeding/harvesting operations for farmers. Estimate & analyze yields and generate statistical reports. It was mostly desktop software with an embedded system extension that would be used in the farming tractors.
Q: Besides your work on ITAT, what work project are you most proud of?
A: For the most part I have been a dedicated ITAT developer and other than ITAT I get to work on the county website and Community Grants public facing external websites and a few internal websites for the county employees.
Q: What are your future goals for your team?
A: We have a great IT team at the county here and there is a lot of team work, collaboration and learning that goes in our day to day work. I would like for us to continue to improve our services to the public citizens for online payments, registrations, etc.
Q: What are some of your hobbies?
A: I have a lot on my list and I try to do little bit of everything. Travelling, cooking, listening to music, photography, crafts & scrapbooking and some gardening when time/weather permits. I like to try different cuisine recipes, enjoy working on smaller art/craft projects, building miniature models etc.
Q: Tell us about your family.
A: I live in Urbandale with my husband and our two daughters, a HS senior and a middle-schooler. We love travelling together, especially we try to do long drives a couple times a year. I have been in the US for the past 24 years now, came here from India for college for better opportunities and continued to live on the American dream.
Q: What was your favorite vacation?
A: Hard to pick one, but our most recent family trip to Europe this summer, was one of the best! With my girls force, we had enjoyed our first ever live concert and got to attend Taylor Swift "The Eras Tour" in Amsterdam. Like I said, I like photography and I enjoyed taking lot of pictures there. Music is something everyone in our family enjoys.
Sarika Mandumula, ITAT Developer
Featured Enhancements
The ITAT Development Team is continuously making improvements to make Iowa Tax And Tags the best payment site possible. Some of the high impact enhancements that the team is working on include:
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ITAT User Accounts (In-Process) – The ITAT development team is heads down, finalizing the development of the user accounts with a planned release later this quarter.
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Saved Payment Methods (In-Process) – Saved Payment Methods is also in active development and will be completed in conjunction with the ITAT User Accounts.
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Scheduled/Recurring Payments (In-Process) - Scheduled and recurring payment functionality is in the planning stage with development to begin soon. Scheduled and recurring payments will be included in a subsequent release to the user accounts and saved payment methods.
- IowaTaxAndTags.org - Information Pages (Planning Stage) - Full review and update of informational pages.
- EV Penalty Calculation (Complete) - Update of penalty calculation fee for delinquent EV and PHEV supplemental EV fees.
Adam Draayer, ITAT Project Owner
The State of ITAT User Accounts
In the current sprint (reminder that a sprint is a two week set of work) we are committed to enhancing the ITAT Admins’ abilities to see user accounts so we can do some basic troubleshooting. This will give us the ability to see if an account exists, what the email associated with the account is, if the account is active, and allow us to disable (or re-enable) these accounts. We are also working on saved receipts this sprint. Users who have made payments previously in their account will be able to find receipts from those previous transactions.
After this sprint the major items left for development are scheduled payments and recurring payments. We are tackling these as two separate efforts. Scheduled payments are one time payments but scheduled for some future date. There will be warning in place for tags transactions to remind users to allow for processing and mailing time and for tax transactions, to ensure that partial payments scheduled within 30 days of the due date have clear communications of the risks of underpayment. Scheduled payments will look and feel a lot like one time payments that users currently use, just on a different day.
Recurring payments, on the other hand, are a much different offering than what has been offered in the past. For property tax payments, users will be able to sign up for an automated payment to be processed monthly, quarterly, or semi-annually for each installment due. They will also be able to sign up for recurring reminders regarding new tax bills as they are loaded, so these recurring payments can continue on year over year, acting more like an escrow payment, helping taxpayers budget effectively.
The current plan is to release user accounts once we have everything except scheduled and recurring payments and introduce these additional features to users in real time. This will hopefully allow us to engage users and get feedback regarding user accounts before we introduce the more complicated elements of scheduled and recurring payments. As always in software development, plans are subject to change depending on complexity or timeframes but this is our plan as of now.
We look forward to delivering an enhanced and more capable Iowa Tax and Tags to your residents and taxpayers soon and invite any feedback you may have.
Event/Location | Date/Time |
Delinquent Tax Notices Mailed | November 1, 2024 |
Report Unclaimed Money to the State | November 1, 2024 |
Daylight Savings Time Ends | November 3, 2024 |
Election Day | November 5, 2024 |
Veterans Day - Office Closed | November 11, 2024 |
Subsequent Tax Payments Eligible for Tax Sale Certificate Holders | November 15, 2024 |
Special Assessment Tax Replacement (Elderly) sent by the State | November 15, 2024 (approximate) |
Homestead/DAV Credit sent by the State | November 15, 2024 (approximate) |
Thanksgiving Day/Friday after Thanksgiving - Office Closed | November 28-29, 2024 |
Remit Brucellosis & Tuberculosis (TB) Eradication Funds to the State | December 15, 2024 |
Christmas Eve Day/Christmas Day - Office Closed | December 24-25, 2024 |
New Year's Day - Office Closed | January 1, 2025 |
Martin Luther King Jr. Day - Office Closed | January 20, 2025 |
1099 Tax Forms Mailed | by January 31, 2025 |
Transitioning to the IowaTaxAndTags.org website is easier than you may think. Contact ITAT today to discuss the benefits of joining the IowaTaxAndTags.org website.
Email: Contact@IowaTaxAndTags.org
ITAT Team:
Dan Radkay, Sr. Applications Developer
Sarika Mandumula, Sr. Applications Developer
Aaron Nord, Applications Developer
Zach Peterson, Applications Developer
Adam Draayer, ITAT Product Owner
Don Lewis, ITAT Project Manager