The Fulton County Tax Assessors Office has confirmed it appraised more than two dozen properties higher than what they sold for last year, despite state law forbidding it.
The failures to apply the new law have hapless homeowners severely overbilled, leading to months of headaches in dealing with mortgage companies and the county bureaucracy. And Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers, who sponsored the legislation, is so flustered he's contemplating adding penalties for counties that don't follow the rules in his next tax reform bill.
The activist whose research exposed the extent of the overassessments says there's no way Fulton has accounted for them all.
"All he did was just go through that little bit of spot checking that I did," said Georgia Property Taxpayers Committee president R.J. Morris, who found 400 properties that appeared to be valued above 2010 sales, 37 of which he verified himself. "I'd say there's hundreds more."
Fulton Chief Appraiser Burt Manning says he's taking at least 29 properties to the Board of Assessors on Thursday to have their assessments lowered to their 2010 sales prices. Others have already been corrected, and more might still be changed, but Manning said he couldn't provide numbers because he hasn't been tracking the issue.
"We're studying this stuff as we go," he said. "It's been quite a learning experience."
For Curtis and Mesha Wright, it's been weeks of panic since they received a $5,000 tax bill -- double what it should be under the law. They bought a house in south Fulton's St. Martins Landing subdivision in May 2010 for $165,000, but their tax value was set at $325,300.
Their mortgage holder, Bank of America, already paid the bill and told the Wrights that, with escrow adjustments, their monthly payments would increase from $1,170 to $1,700 per month. Curtis Wright, an associate with Morgan Stanley, started making plans to move him, his wife and their 4-year-old son in with his mother in Delaware.
"I'm going to be all messed up if they don't fix this soon," Wright said. "If I really can't afford it, I'll just have to let it foreclose."
Fulton isn't the only county where such oversights have occurred. Cobb Chief Appraiser Phil Hogsed said his office fixed nine overassessed houses after the owners showed proof of sales, and Gwinnett Chief Appraiser Steve Pruitt said he corrected 25 in the same manner. Those errors, however, were caught before bills went out.
They attributed their mistakes to some of the same paperwork discrepancies Manning points to. In transactions involving tax-exempt agencies such as Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, sales showed up in records as $0, and staff kept the properties at higher appraised values.
In some cases, Manning said, 2010 sale deeds didn't get recorded until early 2011, so his office missed them. In other cases, building permits got entered into the system after sales dates, when the construction actually occurred before sales.
This is the latest glitch that's cropped up in Fulton this year. The county commission allocated an extra $1.8 million to the assessors office so it could keep up with an anticipated spike in appeals caused by Rogers' law, but so far the office has struggled to comply with the law's stipulations.
Because of omissions and inflated tax bill estimates, the county had to remail 230,000 assessment notices at a cost of $140,000, pushing back the appeals deadline by five weeks for 70 percent of the county.
Then in August, some homeowners whose properties were under appeal received bills calculated at 100 percent of their assessed value. Under a separate state law, owners who are appealing should receive temporary bills calculated at 85 percent. Manning later said he found only eight cases of appeals not entered into the system.
Like other homeowners affected by the latest issue, the Wrights described contacting the assessors office and encountering staffers with no grasp of Senate Bill 346, which took effect this year and has provisions limiting 2011 assessed values to 2010 sales.
Other homeowners said when they complained, they wound up mired in the appeals process.
Charlene Clark, a Gwinnett Technical College professor from Johns Creek, was given several options by her mortgage company after the county put her home's value at $611,700 and billed her at $6,640.
She bought her house on Gates Terrace for $320,355 and should have been billed $3,900. Her property is on Thursday's agenda.
"It has been nerve-wracking to know that I have to come up with another $200 to $300 on my mortgage payments," Clark said. "This is taking too long to get corrected."
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