Lehighton Area School District hopes a wage incentive will persuade its tax collectors to use an updated software program when preparing and sending out bills.

The district has to set the tax collector compensation by Feb. 15."There has been some trouble with the collectors getting bills out in a timely manner, and some of the programs and methods they have used haven't been real effective," Lehighton Business Manager Brian Feick said during a board workshop Monday night. "So what we have done is offered them a 3 percent increase in pay if they use a program offered by the Berks County Intermediate Unit."The new pay structure would see the tax collectors paid $150 per month and $3.10 per bill in 2018 and 2019, followed by $3.20 per bill in 2020 and 2021.They are currently paid $125 per month and $3 per bill, which is the amount they will continue to be paid if they don't use the new software program."We can't mandate that a tax collector changes a software program, but we can entice them," Feick said. "The district would pay for the training and the tax collectors would still have control. They would review them and approve the bills before they go out, but Berks prints the bills and mails them out."This isn't the first time Lehighton has tried to get its tax collectors to update their process of sending out bills.Two years ago, Lehighton's finance committee invited Sue Hawkins from the Berks County Intermediate Unit to give a presentation on the eTaxTrax software program."Palmerton and 30 other school districts in the eastern part of the state use our program," Hawkins said at the time. "We take care of mailing the bills for the collectors."All of the district tax collectors in attendance, however, said they were happy with their own programs.