At a time when property owners across Pennsylvania are struggling to keep up with steadily increasing tax bills from school districts and municipalities, it is important to collect tax dollars as efficiently as possible.

For that reason, and others, efforts in Harrisburg to streamline the tax collection methods of local governments and school districts deserve broad support.

The leading plan for improving tax collection across the state would eliminate the existing 2,900 different taxing districts — and collect taxes on a countywide basis. The various municipalities and school districts would work with their county's centralized tax collection system.

Such a plan makes obvious sense in terms of efficiency and cost savings across the state should amount to hundreds of millions of dollars.

The current system, which employs some 560 tax collectors across the state, is antiquated and inefficient. Modern tax collection systems, like those used in most other states, use some form of centralized tax collection. Switching to a more efficient system based on 66 counties would dramatically reduce the costs of collection.

A 2004 study that examined the collection of earned income tax across the state estimated that about 6 percent of the money sent by taxpayers never gets to the municipality. That lost revenue is spent paying for an inefficient collection system.

According to the state Department of Community and Economic Development, an estimated $100 million a year in earned income tax revenue disappears through redundancies and efficiencies

Presumably a similar level of "tax leakage" occurs in the collection of property taxes. And because property tax collection at the local level amounts to about seven times more money than the earned income tax, the cost savings would be much larger, with total savings topping $700 million at year.

Most people are well aware of how a new contract with the local teachers' union raises their property tax bill. But the costs of collecting taxes is something most people don't think about. They assume that a $100 paid to the school district results in $100 being deposited in the district's bank account. But that is not the case.

The cost of tax collection is largely a hidden cost that is rarely discussed or examined. That is a mistake — and one that taxpayers should not permit to continue.

School districts and municipalities should look at the cost of tax collection — closely and publicly. And before they raise taxes again, they should reveal to their taxpayers how much the current tax collection system is costing.

Pennsylvania's antiquated system of tax collection costs many millions of dollars. Simply moving to an efficient, centralized system will dramatically cut the costs of collection.

It's not that the 560 tax collectors across the state are doing anything wrong. It's the system that is outdated and inefficient.

The state tax collectors association prefers a plan that would retain a tax collector in each of the state's 501 school district. But that would still be needlessly redundant and expensive.

Naturally, the state tax collectors support a system based on the state's 501 school districts, thus preserving most tax collector's jobs.

But the point of reforming tax collection in Pennsylvania is not about preserving jobs that are not needed and are a relic of the past. Replacement of this state's antiquated tax collection system with an efficient, centralized system will save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. That should be the priority.