The head of a beleaguered Cook County technology contractor announced this week he was cutting off communication between his staff and Treasurer Maria Pappas after what he described as months of verbal abuse and threats to ruin the company’s reputation.
The decree — the latest of a series of escalating exchanges — comes as Tyler Technologies and the treasurer’s office attempt to work through the final stages of a decade-long property tax technology upgrade that has turned Pappas into the company’s chief antagonist. Near the top of the to-do list is issuing an estimated $181.9 million in long-awaited refunds to taxpayers.
In a nine-page letter emailed to Pappas and shared with the county board and President Toni Preckwinkle on Monday, H. Lynn Moore, Jr., the president and CEO of Tyler Technologies, described “just a sampling of the abuse you have hurled at Tyler’s personnel.”
In an emailed response, Pappas did not dispute using strong language or threatening Tyler or its leaders’ reputations, but denied many of the more inflammatory claims in Moore’s letter, including allegations that she showed any racial animus.
“I’m passionate about my job and the fact that Cook County taxpayers have been screwed by Tyler,” Pappas said.
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Those incidents snowballed through last Thursday, the letter said, when Pappas threatened to go to Tyler’s board with her complaints and called a top company lawyer an “idiot.”
Pappas did confirm she was angry and that she planned to go to the board “in the hopes of getting some results for the taxpayers of Cook County” after she said Tyler could not meet a two-week deadline to pay out refunds. Among other disagreements, according to Moore’s letter, Tyler and the treasurer are arguing over whether problems issuing refunds should be blamed on bad data from the company or mess-ups in Pappas’ office.
Pappas, a blunt self-described hothead, has been a vocal critic of Tyler for several years, urging Preckwinkle to fire or sue the company as problems with the upgrade of the county’s property tax system piled up, and writing scathing correspondence to Tyler executives.
In letters back and forth over the last year, Tyler officials said Pappas has focused more on criticism than finding solutions to get the project done. Moore described Pappas’ actions in the latest letter as “sabotage” and said she’d never taken accountability for missteps within her office.
As the sender of tax bills, Pappas’ office often bears the brunt of taxpayer complaints regardless of fault, which she frequently cites in her letters. After a months long delay getting tax bills out the door, then more trouble getting revenues to taxing bodies, roughly 8,000 taxpayers still haven’t received their bills and 80,000 are waiting for some kind of refund from the office, according to the treasurer’s office.
Tensions were high before the latest delays went public. According to the letter, Pappas repeatedly insulted a Tyler project manager throughout last spring and separately disparaged Mark Hawkins, who runs Tyler’s property tax division, as “the biggest f−−−-up I’ve ever seen.”
In the letter, Moore alleges Pappas promised to ensure Hawkins “never gets another motherf−−−ing contract in the world ever again” and separately threatened Hawkins’ reputation.
“I never claimed to be a nun,” Pappas said in reference to her swearing, questioning whether she’d get the same heat if she were a man. Of the insults directed at Hawkins, she said, “The fact this job is six years behind schedule with no end in sight speaks for itself.”
Over the Christmas holiday, the letter said, Pappas had a phone call with Abby Diaz, the company’s chief administrative officer. On that call, Pappas “insulted in colorful and sometimes racial language President Preckwinkle, the Bureau of Technology and its leaders, and the County Clerk,” according to the letter.
The letter did not provide examples, but said Pappas “called Abby a ‘token Hispanic’” on the same call and alluded to information she was giving Preckwinkle’s primary challenger Brendan Reilly.
Pappas categorically denied the implication that she had any racial animus, noting she hosted regular programming on Black and Latino media to help taxpayers with exemptions and errors, and that her office had published several studies highlighting “the disproportionate impact local tax policies have on black and brown communities. I believe my record speaks for itself.”
The “token” comment was a warning to Diaz about being treated as a token by Tyler corporate leaders, Pappas said.
Reilly’s campaign denied any coordination with Pappas, and so did Pappas, who is on the Cook County Democratic slate of endorsed candidates with Preckwinkle. The spokeswoman for county Clerk Monica Gordon said the office was unaware of any details of the conversations but said it was committed to finishing the Tyler project “to better serve taxpayers.”
In an emailed statement, Tyler’s media team did not say what precipitated Moore’s letter or respond to other questions about the allegations, including what other “racial language” Moore alleges Pappas used. “We believe your questions are already addressed in the letter,” a Tyler spokesperson said.
The letter does allege there was an “out of the blue” call to Diaz last Thursday in which Pappas threatened to tell Tyler’s board about problems and threatened to “ruin you, not just on this project, but nationally.”
When Diaz questioned further, Pappas responded, “Can you speak English? Learn to speak English,” and later hung up, the letter said.
Pappas said Diaz “is an Ivy League educated lawyer who speaks perfect English. The inference that I didn’t believe she spoke English well enough is absurd.”
In a statement, Preckwinkle spokeswoman Cara Yi said they would be forwarding the “troubling and unacceptable allegations” to the county’s Department of Ethics and Human Rights “for a thorough review and any investigation deemed necessary.”
“Public officials are expected to lead with integrity, demonstrate respect, and uphold the highest ethical standards, fostering public confidence in government,” Yi’s statement said.
Tyler team members will stop taking the treasurer’s calls or having in-person contact with her, and all letters sent to anyone else at Tyler “will be immediately forwarded” to Moore, the letter said. The Tyler team typically stationed at the Cook County building will work from home this week, he wrote, “as I do not feel comfortable having them onsite in the days following your receipt of this letter.”
Going forward, project coordination with outside firm Guidehouse and the county’s Bureau of Technology won’t change, Moore’s letter said, but Tyler’s Hawkins will discuss the county project with a point of contact instead of Pappas, and only if that person “is behaving reasonably and not as your substitute.”