Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas announced that she is taking emergency steps to distribute long-delayed property tax funds to more than 500 local governments after a failed technology rollout halted payments countywide. Pappas took this unprecedented action to distribute $2.3 billion in property tax funds via a bank-to-bank automated clearing house transaction after the Tyler Technologies computer system failed to distribute the money. Tyler Technology’s system failures have prevented the distribution of more than $8 billion to municipalities, school districts and other government agencies that rely on that money to pay for the services they provide. “That’s simply unacceptable,” Pappas said. “Local governments shouldn’t have to worry about their cash flow because a vendor after more than a decade of work has failed to deliver a working system.” Tyler Technologies is a Texas-based company that paid tens of millions of dollars to design Cook County’s new integrated property tax system. That system’s shortcomings delayed the mailing of property tax bills by months.  Now, Tyler’s failures have stalled both the distribution of funds to local governments and refunds to taxpayers. “Every major breakdown in this process leads back to one source,” said Pappas, who five years ago called for the cancellation of the Tyler contract.