DeKalb County continues to be dogged by tax appeal woes from 2011, just weeks before the county plans to send out tax notices for the current year.
Last month, DeKalb failed to give at least 500 people the required time to prepare their tax appeal cases. Officials blamed a scheduling error as the county tried to slog through an unprecedented 19,636 appeals from last year by June, when new appraisals go out – and new appeals start coming in.
This week, though, some homeowners in that original mix-up reported the county had incorrectly notified them they had lost their appeals – by not showing up to the improperly scheduled hearings.
“I don’t know who is hiring these folks, but they are not doing their jobs,” said Susan Blackwell, a Dunwoody credit union manager who has yet to have her appeal hearing reset after the first error in March. “We should not be going through this again.”
DeKalb County Clerk of Superior Court Debra DeBerry apologized for the mix-up but said homeowners needn’t worry about the certified letters, which a computer glitch automatically generated.
DeBerry said anyone with concerns can simply notify the Board of Equalization office, which handles appeals, or her office to set up a new appeals hearing.
"Everyone will have their chance to be heard," DeBerry said.
There is still time, she said, to hold those appeals before June, too. To date, the equalization boards have handled 14,615 appeals – about 75 percent of the record cases that homeowners filed on the heels of a new state law that required every property receive notice of appraisal.
Other counties have seen similar surges from the new law but avoided the scheduling and technical problems that have hit DeKalb.
Neighboring Gwinnett County, for instance, received 31,162 tax appeals last year. That's 11 percent of the county's property, compared to DeKalb's 9 percent, but there were no reports of problems, a county spokesman said.
Blackwell said she is concerned about her own taxes -- a successful appeal would lower her county tax bill by $800 -- but also for everyone in DeKalb. After all, she said, county taxpayers paid to send those erroneous certified letters, at $4 a pop.
"That's just for the mail, but how much did it cost in workers' time to get these done, wrong, again," she asked. "This is costing all taxpayers."
Anyone with questions or concerns can call Byron Scott, supervisor at the DeKalb Board of Equalization, at 404 687-3876 or DeBerry at the Clerk of Superior Court, 404 371-2251.
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