City modifies tax code to mirror garbage plan

Inspired by a January article in The Augusta Chronicle, the Augusta Commission has decided to take a page from its own book in revising the tax code.

A new countywide tax code modeled after the system currently used to calculate garbage pickup costs will be in effect as of January 1, 2008.

Commissioners were excited about the new plan for a number of reasons.

“Turns out there's a lot less overhead in a completely illogical plan,” officials said, “and nothing says ‘Happy New Year!’ quite like new tax policy.”

County officials said they learned a lot from the successes and failures of the current tax system.

“While we liked the system we had in place, it was complicated and involved calculations, assessing property values and handling the appeals; a real hassle.”

“Now, with our new random number generator software, we don’t even have to worry about maps or any of that. With the click of a mouse, we put some computers to work, and there it is!”

Systems analyst Jim Peters said he found no problems with the new system.

“With a random tax amount, there’s nothing to challenge or appeal,” Peters said, “because how do you question a random number?”

“Our budget planners are having a coronary, but what do they know? We should just adopt the federal model; they’ve got a few trillion in IOUs, why not us?”

Mike Jones, a spokesman for the software vendor, GovSys Inc., said the company is glad to be a part of the new Richmond County tax system.

“This is the biggest implementation of our system to date,” Mr. Jones said. “So far, we’ve had a few banana republics, a couple of totalitarian regimes, and now Richmond County.”

Apparently, cost was the primary factor in the selection of GovSys Inc.

“The commission seemed especially excited about our random pricing system when we told them the price could be as low as $1.00,” Jones said. “Unfortunately, after the contract was signed, the random cost ended up being $4.4 million.”

“It works out well for us no matter what. Our total development costs were the two kegs of PBR we gave some college programming students in exchange for the code.”

Richmond County resident Elaine Thomson said she wasn’t impressed with the new tax policy.

“Are they out of their bleeping minds?” Thomson said. “The only plus to the policy would be the possibility of an extremely low tax bill.”

When told the commission had similar high hopes for the purchase price of the new software, Thomson, a county employee, just sighed.

“I’m sure my job’s on the chopping block to pay for that system; just another day for the Augusta Commission.”

Disclaimer: As is the trend with all News Abuser columns, this is 100 percent fake. Read The Onion for more satirical goodness.

What you pay depends on where you live

http://chronicle.augusta.com/stories/010707/met_111631.shtml