Few Acris filings as agency seeks to upgrade data infrastructure
For the second day in a row, very few records were recorded with the city Department of Finance’s Automated City Register Information System, known as Acris.
On a normal day there can be more than a thousand loan and sale transfers recorded, but for Monday and Tuesday, fewer than 100 were recorded, according to an analysis by PincusCo Media.
A spokesperson for the Department of Finance did not respond to a request for comment. However, the agency announced that a new indexing system would be instituted starting September 18, 2020.
The agency sent a letter to City Register customers, which PincusCo obtained:
“We are pleased to inform you that effective September 18, 2020, the Office of the City Register is instituting a new indexing and verification process integrating artificial intelligence and other optical character recognition tools.
“Currently documents are indexed as part of the cover page creation process and later verified by City Register examiners. With these new tools, conflicts between the index information on the document’s cover page and contents will be highlighted for the City Register examiners and will be identified and corrected before recording. Going forward, City Register examiners will correct minor indexing mistakes rather than rejecting the documents in which they appear. In addition, City Register examiners will have the opportunity to redact private information so that more document pages will be available for public view.
“Corrections to cover page index data may change the fees and mortgage recording taxes due, if blocks or lots are added or deleted, or if the property type is corrected. In the event that additional fees or taxes are due, you will receive an email indicating the additional amount due after the review process is complete and all documents are deemed acceptable for recording.
“Finally, in the coming months you will be able conduct a full text search of documents recorded since the introduction of these new tools.”