The following message is from California Tax Credit Allocation Committee Executive Director Mark Stivers:

Dear TCAC Stakeholders,

I very much want to thank the 310 of you who responded to the TCAC customer satisfaction survey in late July and early August.  With respect to the ten factors we asked you to grade us on (outstanding, good, fair, poor, or needs improvement), we were extremely proud to receive average scores at or slightly above good for each factor.

We are well aware, however, that there is always room for improvement, and many of you provided helpful suggestions.  While I cannot respond to every suggestion, I would like to highlight the following more significant items we intend to pursue.

  1. Probably the most common concern related to TCAC’s responsiveness to questions.  I have now asked staff to respond within one business day to calls and emails whenever possible and within three business days at a minimum.  For issues that require research and therefore more time to fully answer or resolve, I have asked staff to get back to the requestor within three business days to let him or her know we are working on it and to give an estimated response time.  If you do not get a response from TCAC staff in three business days, feel free to contact me directly at mark.stivers@treasurer.ca.gov so I can help resolve the issue.
  2. Continue and strengthen our on-going training of staff in order to improve consistency in application reviews, placed in service reviews, and on-site inspections.
  3. Continue and strengthen our efforts to issue inspection letters within 30 days of inspection.
  4. Review the documents on our website to update and consolidate guidance.  Create a webpage for items that are still relatively new but that get pushed out the Highlights box, which is limited to five items.  Space permitting, provide web access to the previous two rounds of competitive applications at a time.
  5. Add the TCAC underwriting criteria to our application checklist in order to help avoid errors.
  6. Summarize changes when updating the compliance manual.
  7. After each round of application or compliance trainings, post and list serve a document with common or significant questions that came up in the trainings and our responses.
  8. Outside of conferences, hold one or more open compliance forums per year for owners and managers to raise issues that need clarification or to make suggestions.
  9. Provide compliance forms in fillable or mergeable versions online.
  10. Create a web-based Project Owner Profile update portal that will allow owners to confirm or alter the project contact information during the required annual update.  This project is already under development with the timing dependent on the Treasurer’s IT department.

The survey responses also included a number of non-specific suggestions such as improving website navigability or forms.  I encourage stakeholders to email me or staff with any specific suggestions you have in this arena or any other.  We appreciate feedback and seek always to improve our customer service.

Thank you again to those of you who participated in our survey.  And whether you participated or not, the door remains open to good ideas to improve TCAC’s administration of the tax credit program.

 

   Mark Stivers
Executive Director