March 14th, 2023 by WCBC Radio

Comptroller Brooke Lierman has issued the following statement on the restoration of the agency's internal tax processing system:

“On Monday, March 13, the Comptroller of Maryland’s internal tax processing system was restored. The system had been offline since Monday, March 6. Our staff is processing tax returns, refund requests, and direct debit requests and is working expeditiously through the week-long backlog. We expect to be fully up-to-date in processing requests by Wednesday, March 22. We pride ourselves on providing timely service and apologize for the inconvenience the service outage caused.

“I would also like to extend my deepest gratitude to our staff in the Comptroller’s Office, including our new Chief Information Officer, Robert O’Connor, and all the members of our IT Division who worked very long hours and through the weekend to ensure we could restore this essential system. I am grateful for their teamwork and diligence over the last week.  

“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. 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.”