Case study · Founder / Developer

GAScout

Built because Georgia's delinquent-tax data exists only as a 9,915-page fixed-width mainframe PDF — a format built for a printer, not for analysis. The extraction engine's job is to turn that dump into something a policy researcher can query, cut, and trust: parsed and checksum-verified line by line, with zero dropped rows, so aggregate figures are traceable back to source instead of estimated.

2026livePython · Astro v5 · Vanilla JavaScript · Cloudflare Pages · pypdf

$62.75Muncollected delinquent tax liability tracked across 8 tax cycles

409,142line items parsed from 9,915 mainframe PDF pages with 0 dropped rows

90automated offline test fixtures verifying parser & checksum integrity

A static public-records intelligence dashboard and daily extraction pipeline built on DeKalb County delinquent tax listings.

County tax listings are published as a monolithic 9,915-page fixed-width mainframe PDF file (DQ205GADEK). The python extraction engine ingests the document offline line-by-line, detecting and auto-correcting 32 column-overflow shifts via a 5-column checksum verification algorithm. The pipeline enforces 100% line accounting — zero dropped rows, zero malformed records — backed by 90 automated offline test fixtures.

The web interface presents aggregate financial insights without publishing personal PII:

Tax Year Trend Explorer: Multi-metric trend analysis showing how 56.9% ($35.7M) of outstanding debt sits in the 2025 cycle, while 26,000+ 2018 records remain open as long-tail “zombie properties”.
Pareto Economic Breakdown: Highlighting how 77.8% of rows are micro-bills under $100, whereas just 1,023 bills (> $5,000) hold over $11.3M in debt.
Interactive Policy Collection Simulator: Live threshold tool allowing policy researchers to test collection targets ($100, $500, $1,000, $5,000+) to calculate recovered revenue ($M), percentage of county debt cleared, and owner contact efficiency.
Georgia Tax Status Classification: Clear breakdown detailing Fi.Fa. Lien Execution (F), School Tax Delinquency (S), Assessment Appeals (A), and Claim Transfers (T).