Errors to Delay Perry County Tax Bills by 3-4 Months

</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[ The Illinois Department of Revenue has red-flagged Perry County's sampling of assessment documentation for the 2008 tax cycle, and has told Supervisor of Assessments Robin Edwards she has to re-submit the abstract.

The errors that the state's review board has found stops the work of the current board of review and will likely delay the mailing of tax bills to local property owners by 3-4 months. That means that tax bills probably will not go out until the holidays and towns, schools and road districts won't get this year's tax money before the end of the year.

Edwards said she has been working on the problems since her Department of Revenue review meeting in Springfield on July 30th and has been given until August 15th to prepare a new abstract. An abstract is the overview of her office's assessment work during the past year with the goal of assessing property at one-third of its fair market value.

Edwards said that at the end of the day, assessment errors amounting to $64,000 in a countywide assessed valuation of $190 million are at issue.

Earlier this year, Edwards applied a local multiplier of 10 percent on properties in Du Quoin and Pinckneyville and 13 percent in outlying areas to artificially equalize assessments at 33 1/3 percent of their fair market value because the state has said the county's assessments are generally too low.

The Illinois Department of revenue can then add it's own multipier on top of the 10 percent and the 13 percent if it still believes the assessments are too low.

It did that, generating a multipier of 1.035--adding another 3.5 percent increase--which typically results in even higher taxes. This is a one-year multiplier which drops off after this tax cycle ends. All told, however, Perry County real estate owners are now faced with a 13.5 percent increase in assessments in Du Quoin and Pinckneyvile, and a 16.5 percent increase in rural areas.

Edwards told the newspaper this morning she went to the July 30th hearing to try and mitigate those large increases.

She said she went back through the sampling of 250 real estate transactions from 2006 used in the documentation and tried to make a case to get the state's own multiplier back to 1.000.

She said she found errors in sales transaction documentation submitted by preparers--banks, attorneys, realtors, etc. She also found errors in the work of her own office.

For instance, when a property with a doublewide mobile home sitting on it is sold, the sales transaction needs to separate the value of the land and out buildings from the value of the mobile home (which is taxed as personal property under the mobile home tax). If that is not done, it can throw off what's known as the sales study ratio. That ratio is the average of real estate transactions during the year.

But, instead of commending Edwards for her work, reviewers at the July 30th hearing told Edwards the documentation masked deeper problems with the abstract.

For example, there were errors in the "green sheets" which are filed with the assessor's office and the clerk's office by transaction preparers.

There were problems with what's known as "arm's length" transactions. Those are transactions like the sale of a home or a business property which have a fair market value selling price attached to them versus things like auctions and family land transactions which don't necessarily involve fair market values.

The board said some of the assessments in the sampling were from the wrong year. Some of the assessments were still under review by the Board of Review.

Edwards said because the errors skewed the sales ratio, the state declared both the sales ratio and the abstract used to determine this year's tax bills invalid.

Quoting from the Illinois Department of Revenue: "(Perry County) must redo the entire process of editing the transfer declarations to determine which sales are bona fide arm's length transactions and which of those sales can be used in the sales study ratio."

"Some of this is my fault and I apologize," said Edwards. "We should have checked things, but it wasn't a priority because of all the work we have had to do on farmland reassessments," she said.

In its final statement, the Illinois Department of Revenue said, "This rather unfortunate turn of events delays the tax cycle for Perry County by potentially another three to four months."

Edwards commented, "I know I have a responsibility to the taxing districts of Perry County and realize the inconvenience this may cause, but at the same time,I have the responsibility to the taxpayers to ensure accurate assessments. I appeared at the hearing in hopes of providing evidence that may reduce our tentative multiplier to 1.000. I apologize for the delay this has caused, but I, in no way want the taxpayers to pay a tax bill based on an incorrect state multiplier."

The various steps involved in the state certifying the 2008 multiplier for this tax year are generally in 30-day increments, all adding up to the 90-120-day delay. Edwards hopes that timetable can be shortened.

She said she knows the delay will result in hardships for some taxing districts and she asks taxpayers themselves to set aside the funds they would have used to pay their taxes this fall.

All county offices had hoped that the 2008 tax bills would be in the mail by the end of August.