Case Study: County of Marin achieves application modernization and code transparency with OpenText Visual COBOL

Safeguarding over $80B in property assessments and $825 million in annual tax collection and distribution by improving development collaboration and supporting code transparency with Visual COBOL

County of Marin, a California county overseeing over $80 billion in property assessments and collecting more than $825 million in annual property taxes, relied on a COBOL-based TAPIS system developed in the 1980s to manage critical valuation and tax processes. With aging hardware and separate development toolsets that limited collaboration and modernization, the county needed a platform update to maintain accuracy, availability and future-proof its tax processing systems.

Marin executed a phased modernization to Micro Focus Visual COBOL with a SQL backend and Microsoft TFS for centralized source control, using parallel testing to validate results. The upgrade recompiled the vast majority of COBOL code with Micro Focus support, consolidated development in Visual Studio, improved disaster recovery and version control, and made collaboration and hiring easier—building on earlier gains (a prior Net Express move reduced operating costs by 91% and halved batch times) and paving the way for further interface modernization and cloud adoption.

County of Marin

Bob Mahoney

IT Manager