King County Assessor Hara vows not to "nickel and dime" property owners

According to a story published June 1 in The Seattle Times:

King County Assessor Lloyd Hara is studying whether thousands of properties have been significantly undervalued for tax purposes, and whether their owners should be billed for underpayment — even though the owners may have paid their tax bills in full.

Because the county has the authority, in cases of "manifest error," to bill landowners for three years of past taxes, millions of dollars could be at stake.

Read the full story.

The King County Assessor's Office responded today:

Inquiry continues into unreported assets by Chase Bank

Past property values that remained unchanged in recent years will be left as-is following a review of the property tax rolls, but King County Assessor Lloyd Hara (pictured) today directed staff to conduct an audit of business property reported by the old Washington Mutual after a discrepancy was found in a recent report filed by new buyer JP Morgan Chase.

"Harley Hoppe, a former Assessor from more than 20 years ago, brought us three examples of assessed values he thought weren't accurate. He told the same thing to the County Council and the County Executive, and several Council members asked me to look into it.," said Hara. "So far, we haven't found any sweeping error or oversight."

"As of now, I've told staff there will be no changes to anyone's past assessed value, no one is getting a new tax statement, but we are going to look into the Chase Bank situation."

The Seattle Times reported that Hoppe thought there were three areas to review:

• Properties where values hadn't changed in recent years;
• Properties where the sales price was significantly higher than the assessed value;
• Personal business property that was under-reported or unreported by businesses operating in King County.

Hoppe cited Chase Bank as having not reported as much as $300 million in fine art it acquired when it took over Washington Mutual. Hara said King County records show that Washington Mutual reported $5,868 in art work its last year while Chase Bank reported zero. Business property, such as artwork, is subject to county tax through a self-reporting system. It is unclear why Chase did not report the artwork, so Hara directed staff to conduct a more detailed audit of assets as Washington Mutual was taken over by the giant New York bank.

Hara, who was elected Assessor just last November, said his staff reviewed the County's entire tax roll of 660,000 parcels and came up with 38,400 where values didn't change from 2008 to 2009.  Upon more in-depth inspection, Hara said roughly a third of those were properties exempt from taxes - such as publicly-held property or those with a senior exemption - and the remainder showed no value change for a variety of legitimate reasons. For example, the value of a property seldom changes significantly the year after County appraisers have conducted a physical inspection. State law requires every parcel to be physically inspected once every six years.

The Assessor's office is examining Hoppe's other assertions, but has not yet come to any conclusion. "We're simply doing our due diligence," said Hara.

Based upon the number of emails he's received, Hara said he also wanted to clear up some misunderstandings. Hara said he was simply responding to issues raised by Hoppe, just as the Assessor has for other taxpayers. Hara said County Council members asked him to look into the issues but it wasn't initiated by the Assessor. In addition, Hoppe has no financial relationship with the Assessor's office.

"I know how sensitive taxpayers are right now about their property taxes. I've been hearing them at town meetings around King County," Hara added. "But I'm also concerned that media coverage may have created a misimpression that we were somehow looking at sending everyone a new property tax statement for past years. We are not."

"Property taxes have to be fair and equitable. The review we conducted quickly led me to conclude there was no across-the-board, systemic problem of properties being overlooked. We're continuing to review the situation with the Prosecuting Attorney's Office and will review the major business property cases as part of our routine due diligence."

"We all know King County is in a financial pinch," said Hara, "But this office, while I'm Assessor, is not going to be nickel and diming every taxpayer in some crazy attempt to balance our budget. We can do better than that."