Maryland tax system down temporarily as billions of records move to cloud-based system

by Bryan P. Sears, Maryland Matters
August 20, 2026

Maryland’s tax administration system is getting update.

Comptroller Brooke Lierman Wednesday announced the current system which dates back to when she was a student at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda will move from a mainframe to the cloud. Her office’s systems will be down for the next two weeks while the transfer happens.

” I just want to give a shout out to our team, Team Comptroller,” Lierman said at the close of the Board of Public Works meeting. “They’ve worked for years towards this moment. A shout out to Marylanders for bearing with us for the next two weeks. Our systems will be down. It just simply takes that long to get data from one place to another.” 

The current system was installed three-decades ago and runs on the a mainframe and a computing language known as COBOL. The business computing language was invented in 1959 — the same year Goldstein took over as comptroller.

Under Goldstein, Maryland was the first state to move to a computerized tax collection and processing system, according to the Maryland State Archives.

The current system was installed in 1995 — roughly three years before Goldstein died in office in July 1998, ending his 10-term tenure.

On Wednesday, the office started the process of moving over to a new cloud-based system.

“So, 30 years ago, I was a student at Walt Whitman High School, and Louis Goldstein was our comptroller — I am pretty sure I did not know that Maryland had a comptroller when I was in high school — but they were very busy in the office of the comptroller moving all of our paper tax records into a new mainframe system whose acronym is SMART, and there they have lived on that mainframe system in COBOL for the past 30 years,” Lierman said.

“Starting today, we began moving 4 billion records from that mainframe through fiber into our new cloud-based modern tax system,” she said.

The move is expected to be completed by Sept, 1 when the state’s chief tax collector launches Maryland Tax Connect for individual taxpayers, Lierman said.

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