Oregon County Assessors must send out property tax statements to all property taxpayers in the County no later than October 25. If you run a business or own real property, you’ll be getting your statements soon. Over the next few weeks I’ll be covering many of the topics you need to be aware of before December 31, 2018 — your deadline to appeal if your Assessor got something wrong this year.
Property tax statements are what I get the most questions about. They are easy to read in terms of finding the amount owed, but are difficult to understand — and even harder to cull the embedded information you need from — when reviewing whether or not you should appeal your tax amount. I am always happy to help taxpayers through a review at no cost to them, so feel free to give me a call or send me an email with your tax statements.
This year in particular Multnomah County property taxpayers should be more diligent than previous. The Assessor has recently replaced its property assessment and taxation software. This new software is responsible for producing all property tax statements that will be sent to property taxpayers in the County. Anyone who has ever completed a software update knows that there are almost always bugs — so we can give the Assessor some slack if there are problems. Especially because the Assessor’s office admits that it is possible that problems will occur and has set up a hotline for you to call in case of software bugs (503-988-2565).
Unfortunately, the Assessor’s hands are tied if the problem involves your real market or assessed value and it hasn’t been resolved by December 31, 2018. In this case, you’ll have to file an appeal because after December 31 the Assessor is unable to make changes to values.
Assessors are understanding of the need to protectively appeal and will continue to work with the taxpayer to explain or resolve any issue after the appeal. Once resolved, you typically enter a stipulated judgment with the Assessor correcting the issue. In circumstances where the taxpayer and Assessor agree that there was no error to correct — just a misunderstanding — the taxpayer can withdraw with no penalty so long as the appeal was filed in good faith (in other words — don't file a frivolous appeal!).
For non-residential property taxpayers, the deadline to apply for appeal is difficult to determine. My advice is to assume the December 31, 2018 valuation appeal deadline applies to appeals in this situation; although, there is a good cause exception (ORS 305.288(3)) that may apply if you miss it. Call me if you discover a mistake after the start of 2019 and we can work through whether you still have any right to appeal.
Residential property taxpayers arguably have two years to appeal if there is an error. But again, the December deadline should be followed to be safe.
You can protectively appeal any time before December 31 to preserve your rights if you discover a problem with or have a concern about your property tax statement. There’s a modest filing fee of $30 if you’re not a state appraiser industrial- or central-assessed company. If you are one of the latter, then your fee is $265 and your appeal is filed with the Tax Court.
Next post, I will be covering the estimated $3.6 billion of “exception value” being added to taxpayers’ MAV (Maximum Assessed Value) and detail how to determine if that happened to you. It’s not always obvious!
