Tax collection is a major factor in determining the operating income of the city of Acapulco, Mexico. In city government, efficiency is directly related to the size of the operating budget. The success of tax collection efforts determines how much, or how little, a city needs to rely on federal funding.

On the average, Mexican cities rely on the federal government for approximately 85 percent of their funding. That means local income, generated from tax collection, usually only constitutes approximately 15 percent of city budgets. The average Mexican city depends heavily on the federal government for money because, in many cases, its tax collection efforts are lacking.

In 2001, the city of Acapulco sought to improve its tax collection methods and increase its operating income while decreasing reliance on federal funding. At the time, all the city's documents—including the property titles, land receipts, and maps—were scattered throughout multiple offices and storage rooms. It was difficult to compare documents. The process often took days, since a formal request for information had to be made, the archives searched, photocopies made, and information mailed. The city decided tax collection would become easier if those scattered documents and maps were coordinated in a system in which a tax receipt could be examined alongside maps of land parcels.

The Land and Taxes Department identified several recurring problems contributing to poor tax collection:

• Land property registries were not updated.
• Changes in ownership and new property construction were not reported to the Land and Taxes Department.
• The property titles were inaccurate.
• Year-by-year accounts of individual land receipts were stored separately from the land property registries.

All of this resulted in many precious workday hours being spent determining which taxes were being paid properly, which land developments owed new taxes, and which didn't. When the city of Acapulco decided to bring all this information—land property registries, property titles, tax receipts, etc.—into a single digital interface, it contacted Esri's distributor in Mexico, Sistemas de Informaci�n Geogr�fica, S.A. (SIGSA). SIGSA was chosen because of the company's experience with both mapping and imaging software.

First, the city needed to scan all of its records and make them available in digital format. Since the city wanted to tie the images into another mapping interface, it had to make sure the images were stored in a nonproprietary document management software with an open architecture that would enable city programmers to easily create a custom integration. The city of Acapulco chose software from Laserfiche (Long Beach, California), an Esri Business Partner, because it met the open architecture requirements and had accomplished successful digital conversions in municipal records projects around the world.

The city of Acapulco then configured a GIS system using ArcView and ArcIMS to map condominiums in the Golden and Diamond Zones, where most residential construction takes place in the city. City employees took panoramic pictures of the Acapulco coastline and each property front and digitized all the pictures with ArcView. The application works tridimensionally, mapping properties by location, level, and real estate value, which ranges from $250,000 (U.S.) to $1.1 million (U.S.).

After more than 550,000 land registry archives—property titles, tax property receipts, and other legal documents—were digitized with Laserfiche software, the city linked the mapped ArcView parcels with the appropriate scanned documents. It also made all the scanned records available online through the city of Acapulco's Web site for citizen and notary access.

To improve its tax collection rate, the city of Acapulco needed to be able to point to a land parcel and easily pull all tax records associated with it. By developing geographic relationships between tax documents and each land parcel, Acapulco made keeping those records up-to-date much easier. Just by clicking on land parcels, Land and Taxes Department employees can get an easier handle on who owes taxes and who does not. They could also check the ArcView property pictures against tax records to see if all new construction has been properly taxed and collected.

By integrating GIS and document management solutions from Esri and Laserfiche, the city of Acapulco increased its rate of tax collection fourfold without raising taxes. Thanks to these technological solutions, the city of Acapulco's Land and Taxes Department has been transformed.

Today, the city of Acapulco has Mexico's fourth best tax collection ratio. During the period 1999-2004, the tax collection rate increased 137 percent. The city's income budget grew from 500 million pesos in 2000 to more than 1.1 billion pesos in 2004. The percentage of federally sourced funds is approximately 52 percent, with the city generating nearly half its own funding. When the national tendency to rely on federal funds is taken into account, the city of Acapulco is doing an outstanding tax collection job. The financial health of the city was also reflected by an A+ (Mex) rating from Standard and Poor's and from Fitch in July 2003.

More than 240 million pesos per year are coming from property and property registry tax collection. Using the Internet and GIS, Acapulco has successfully linked geographic information with financial information.

For more information, contact Alejandro Catalan, director of cartography, city of Acapulco (e-mail: omnidigital@hotmail.com); Alfonso D�vila, SIGSA (tel.: 52-55-5575-4585); or Laserfiche (tel.: 800-985-8533, e-mail: gis@laserfiche.com).