As many as 15 percent of the property tax cards mailed to property owners this week contain errors, ranging from the wrong address or parcel number to—in some cases—the incorrect value of the property, said County Assessor Larry Stone.
Stone’s office realized the problem Monday and acknowledged an error in property value could not have come at a worse time for homeowners given the credit crisis from the imploding housing market.
“The whole idea of sending assessment notification cards to begin with was to provide clarity prior to the time that the roll closes, and unfortunately we didn’t provide clarity. We provided confusion,” he told KCBS’s Matt Bigler.
The assessed value in the county database was correct, Stone said, but a third-party vendor his office hired printed incorrect values on cards mailed to homes and businesses in twelve zip codes.
Most of the 471,000 notices sent out were entirely accurate. Stone said corrected notices would be mailed to affected property owners within the next two weeks.
(jro) |
KCBS's Matt Bigler reports
