Statement of Economic Interests Suite
The E-Filing Solution for City and County Agencies
With NetFile’s Statement of Economic Interests Suite, you can easily turn your local City or County agency into your own e-filing system for local Statement of Economic Interests filers! No IT involvement required because NetFile hosts the system on its own secure servers.
There are 3 main parts to the system:
Administration Application
The SEI Administration Application helps local City or County governments administer the myriad of tasks revolving around working with the Statement of Economic Interests form.
Administration of filers becomes easy with the automation of tasks. Pre-notification of the annual filing deadline is made simple through one or more e-mail blasts to the filers. Instantaneous filing status reports are generated on the fly by staff and filing officers/liaisons. Amendments get cut down to zero on documents that are electronically filed in the system. When the filer creates their filing in the online system, the system validates each required area of the filing so the filer cannot forget to supply required information.
Handling changes to the conflict of interest code is a breeze in the NetFile system. When the code changes, all filers can be automatically updated to the new code. When the filer logs in to the system, they can see the new code change.
The system acts as your repository for all filers (both electronic and paper). You can gain assistance at the department or commission level by assigning Filing Officer/Liaison privileges. These Filing Officers/Liaisons have their own unique log-in to help manage their group of filers. They can generate filing status reports and given your permission, make changes to a filer’s profile. If you permit, they can even document receipt of the wet signed document into the system. Upon doing so, your filing status report is automatically updated.
Filers are created in the database just once. Letters can automatically be generated
to welcome filers, notify filers, make amendments, notify late filers, or generate
fines. If the public wants to see a filing, you can point them to the public viewing
portal that shows the automatically redacted filing or if in your office, point
them to your computer that has been assigned the Kiosk Mode where they can retrieve
original non-redacted filings.
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E-Filer Application
The Statement of Economic Interests E-Filer Application replaces the antiquated paper and pen form generation. It also replaces the tedious fill-in-the-form PDF (all the while hoping you don’t lose your Internet connection) method.
The filer is the big winner with the NetFile system. Lose your internet connection while creating your filing? No sweat. Once you get connected again, log back in and all your data is there. Forgot what you filed last year? Not a problem. When the filer logs into their profile, they can view all previous filings made in the system. Need to amend? Easy as pie. Just click on the filing you want to amend, make your changes, review it for accuracy, and then e-file the amendment. Filer not sure what is required on any part of the form? Piece of cake. The system has onscreen validation in addition to page specific documentation. How much easier can it get?
Best of all, after a filer files for the first time, all their data that needs to carry into their next filing does! Filers with little or no changes literally take seconds to make their next filing.
What is even simpler is how you notify your filers of their log-in information. It all starts with your local City or County website with a link to filing a Form 700. The first time filer tells the system they need to register and is prompted to enter their unique e-mail address. The system checks that the e-mail exists in the admin database and then sends the filer an e-mail with their password. After picking up their e-mail from the system, the filer logs in and can now create their filing.
Last but not least, since the system validates the filing all throughout the filer
process, the filer can’t make a technical error by omission of required data. This
is a win/win scenario. The local City or County doesn’t have to send out amendment
notifications and the filer doesn’t have to worry that they forgot something required
on the form.
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Public & Private Viewing Application
Public Viewing
When a filer electronically files their Statement of Economic Interest filing, every City and County government agency has the option to have that filing show in an automatically redacted version in the public viewing portal. These filings are shown by default in alphabetical order but can be searched by name or date of filing.
At the instruction of the City or County client, these filings can be limited to show only certain categories of filers (for example, Category 1 and Category 5 filers) or by some other common variable such as 87200 filers.
For paper only filed documents, the City and County client can choose to manually redact and upload that filing to view on the public portal as well. If a filing is reported in the admin system but no filing is uploaded to be viewed on the public site, the interested person visiting the public portal will be notified the filing occurred but they will have to come into the office to view the filing.
Private Viewing - Kiosk Mode
The private viewing portal (Kiosk Mode) allows the City or County client the ability to place one of their own computers in a public viewing area. The purpose would be to give the public who come into your office the ability to search an non-redacted filing without having to use expensive staff time to find, copy, and re-file statements. The agency owned computer could be set up to print behind the counter in case the interested person wanted to leave with a paper copy of the filing. All staff has to do is charge the per copy fee. That’s it, nothing else to do!
The kiosk computer would be tied down via secure certificates so only that computer
(or computers) the agency chooses would have the ability to view Kiosk Mode.
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