A group of hopeful Cook County property owners eager to get breaks on their tax bills are likely to end up disappointed.
About 1,700 certificates of error — one-page requests to correct property assessment mistakes — were turned in to Assessor Fritz Kaegi’s office late last month. Successful applications can result in refunds for taxpayers, but the “vast majority” of the batch are missing any evidence or valid grounds for relief, a Kaegi spokesman said, meaning the homeowners likely struggling to pay their bills would be out of luck.
Those certificates were submitted by the county’s Board of Review, and represent the highest number the body has submitted since the 2021 tax year. The Board typically hears appeals to Kaegi’s valuations, but amid last year’s soaring bills, its most senior member, Commissioner Larry Rogers Jr., also encouraged taxpayers to make their displeasure about last year’s bills known by filling out certificates.
“The Board is acting urgently to protect residents who have been hit hardest by these extraordinary and unreasonable increases,” Rogers said in a release last week. “Our commitment is to ensure that no taxpayer is left shouldering an inaccurate or inflated assessment.”
Though the Board of Review celebrated that those submissions “correct documented inaccuracies in the Assessor’s property valuations,” Kaegi alleges that because Board of Review staffers didn’t vet those applications for accuracy or completeness, they gave taxpayers false hope and set Kaegi up to be the villain when the applications were likely rejected.
Asked if staff checked whether forms were properly filled out, Board of Review chief deputy commissioner William O’Shields said the board “fulfilled its responsibility of receiving, recording and forwarding to the Assessor such documents.”
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The Tribune reviewed a sampling of the 1,700 submitted certificates of error. Dozens left key sections blank. That included address, property identification number, or the justification for the certificate. All but one, according to the assessor, lacked evidence to back up their claim.
A good application would include examples of comparable properties sold or assessed at a lower value, an appraisal that shows Kaegi’s assessment was far off, or evidence that the assessor made a significant mistake on things like square footage or had the wrong description of a home or building. Taxpayers can also fill out certificates if they’re missing an exemption.
In a box where applicants state the reason they should receive a certificate, many submitted apparently photocopied applications that read “taxes to [sic] high,” which isn’t a valid reason to get an assessment cut. The assessor’s office estimated about 80% of submissions included high property taxes as the sole argument. The Board denied distributing any photocopies with that reasoning on it.
In the process of urging homeowners to seek relief, Kaegi spokesman Christian Belanger said in an emailed statement that the Board of Review misled “homeowners struggling to pay their bills. This is manipulative, reprehensible behavior” that also likely damaged Kaegi’s reputation in the run-up to the March Democratic primary.
When soaring bills for Chicago homeowners were landing last fall, it kicked off finger-pointing over rising levies and the accuracy of assessments. The bill jumps were especially high in neighborhoods like Englewood and North Lawndale. To offset some of that pain, the Board of Review offered taxpayers a longer window to file appeals for next year’s bills, and Kaegi’s office held more than two dozen events between November and December to help taxpayers, including help applying for missed exemptions.
Kaegi’s office this week noted, however, that the certificates from the Board of Review weren’t turned over with urgency to get processed. Most were collected between November and January but submitted in late March. Asked about the lag, O’Shields’ statement said there is “no defined filing period or other deadline for Certificates of Error.”
O’Shields also denied any political motivations behind the push to collect the certificates before the election. “If these Certificates of Error were used for political purposes, they would have been sent to Assessor Kaegi before he lost the primary election, not after,” his statement said.
Kaegi lost to Lyons Township Assessor Pat Hynes in that race and will leave office in December.
“The election is over. The Board of Review has always been focused solely on the work of serving and helping taxpayers burdened by unfair, excessive assessments. Evidently, the assessor’s focus is elsewhere,” O’Shields’ statement said.
The 1,700 mostly faulty certificate claims are a relative drop in the bucket. An estimated 20,000 approved certificate of error refunds worth more than $46 million are bottlenecked at the Cook County treasurer’s office.
That’s on top of roughly 67,000 other pending property tax payouts currently held up. Together, all of those refunds totaled more than $196 million through March 23.
The payouts are in technological limbo thanks to the ongoing trouble with the county’s property tax system upgrade. The Tyler Technologies-helmed project to streamline and improve the county’s property tax systems has taken more than a decade to complete, and refunds are among its final tasks and current stumbling blocks.
The vast majority of the roughly 20,000 pending certificates of error are for missing exemptions that should have been applied in the 2024 tax year. Some certificate of error payouts have trickled through: Between late December and the start of this month, 1,343 refunds worth $2.57 million were processed in Tyler’s system and sent to taxpayers, the treasurer’s office said.