Why some Tarrant County property owners still don’t have a tax bill

Just weeks before the end of the year, hundreds of Tarrant County property owners are still without tax bills, leading to criticism that the county’s appraisal system has been tardy in setting land values following a heavy load of protests.

While property-tax payments are not due until Jan. 31, many people prefer to pay their bill before the end of the year to qualify for a tax deduction. For those who pay their taxes in installments, the first payment is due Nov. 30, with the balance due in June 2017.

Tarrant Appraisal Review Board Chairman Olen Frazier said his agency has issued about 56,000 final orders on land values and has about 1,300 left to issue. Considering that the county has about 1.6 million accounts, Frazier said his office has done a good job.

“Looking at the totality of what we did send out in final orders, I think we have a fairly good track record,” Frazier said.

But property-tax consultants describe the situation as a nightmare, saying hundreds of their customers have not received the final property values needed to determine their taxes.

Those agents also said that other customers received final orders from the review board months after a decision was made, sometimes with faulty information. One agent said a client recently received 96 property-tax bills and that 40 contained information he believed to be inaccurate.

“It is a nightmare. It is an ongoing problem and there doesn’t seem to be an end,” said Tracy Stanley, a veteran real estate tax consultant who said about 20 percent of his clients have not received final orders. “They need to get this resolved so they can pay their property taxes before the end of December.”

Jonathan Kutner, who owns propertytaxprotest.com in Dallas, said some of his clients also received notices containing errors. He said that after he complained about problems in August, he received a corrected report in September. But that document was still missing key data, he said.

“There is no excuse for the appraisal district to not print those notices in a timely fashion,” Kutner said.

The agents mostly lay the blame on the Tarrant Appraisal District’s troubled computer system. Earlier this year, new software was blamed with not capturing changes in values from exemptions and property sales, among other things, leading the Tarrant County tax assessor-collector’s office to issue $12 million in refunds.

Frazier said his agency, which works with TAD but is a separate entity, takes the complaints it recently received seriously and is investigating each one.

Tarrant County Tax Assessor-Collector Ron Wright said he can’t issue a property-tax bill until his office receives a report reflecting that final order. But taxpayers also can’t claim ignorance of what they owe as an excuse to not pay taxes. He said his office will help property owners estimate their bill to avoid penalties and interest.

“We want to keep people out of trouble,” Wright said.

While conceding that the number of accounts without final orders is relatively small, Wright said he was surprised to hear about the problems during a TAD board meeting earlier this month. He is a nonvoting member of the board.

“It is very serious,” Wright said. “If you are the one taxpayer caught up in that, it messes with your life, when you don’t know what your taxes are this late in the year.”

A crucial piece of paper

Property owners started filing protests in the spring after receiving notices from the Tarrant Appraisal District that set the value of their land and any improvements on it, such as a house, for taxing purposes. This year, about 103,000 property owners or their agents filed protests, double the usual amount.

But not everyone who protested their property-value appraisal gets, or needs, a final order.

Some protests were withdrawn, and others were settled with TAD without going before the appraisal review board for a formal hearing, officials said. TAD Chief Appraiser Jeff Law said only 40 percent to 50 percent of those filing protests actually end up before the review board.

Property owners and agents who request a formal hearing appear before a panel of three citizens who listen to evidence from them and the appraisal district. They recommend a final value, which then must be approved by a quorum of the 85 members of the appraisal review board. If approved, a final order is sent by certified mail. If a land owner still doesn’t agree, they can seek arbitration or take the case to court.

Property-tax agents, who are hired by landowners because they don’t understand or have the time to navigate the protest system, say they keep notes of what the review board decides but said they are reluctant to tell their clients what they owe without an official document.

“You’re talking about property taxes. Nobody wants to do anything without a piece of paper,” Kutner said. “Why rely on anything other than a written record to pay taxes?”

Stephen Dunson at IntegraTax in Fort Worth, who reluctantly spoke out at the appraisal district meeting this month, said he had about 230 clients without a final order. He has also seen final orders with a different number than what he believes the review board approved.

Working late into the night

During a meeting with TAD board members this month, property-tax agents said staff members were overworked and often working late into the night to process accounts and protests and solve problems.

Tarrant Appraisal District Board Chairman Joe Potthoff said at the board meeting that there is a problem when someone sends an email at 9:30 p.m. and it is answered at 9:31 p.m.

But the agents also raised questions about TAD’s computer software, which has experienced serious glitches since it was purchased in 2011 for $1.9 million. TAD has withheld payments and received about an $800,000 refund after the vendor failed to deliver a properly functioning system on time, records show.

The system created chaos earlier this year when TAD was unable to produce a timely and accurate property-tax roll, creating a situation where the county was forced to refund $12 million to taxpayers at a time of year when money flowing into county coffers was at a low ebb.

“That computer system is giving us fits,” Dunson said.

Law said his staff is researching each complaint made by the property-tax agents.

“We want to make sure everyone has the correct value on their property each and every year, and we are working to make sure that any decision made by the review board is reflected on the tax bills,” Law said. “We had more protests this year than in past years. We’re still researching exactly what caused the mistakes or if that was a computer problem.”

This story was originally published November 19, 2016 at 11:20 AM with the headline "Why some Tarrant County property owners still don’t have a tax bill."