The Marion County assessor says his office has finished recalculating bogus assessments for 6,370 homes
that had been overvalued, many by 20 percent or more.Assessor Joe O'Connor said the problem affected more homeowners than the 5,000 ballpark estimate he had given earlier this month, after the problem was discovered. In the first wholesale reassessment of Marion County property in a decade, his office failed -- in 52 older neighborhoods -- to factor in recent home sales data
because there had been too few recent home sales.The affected neighborhoods are spread across Center, Washington and Warren townships, O'Connor said today. After a two-week review, the office corrected $90 million in combined overvaluation, he said, or an average $14,129 per home
."It was a mathematical fix," O'Connor said, "so it didn't take long to identify."
The fixes mean that those homeowners won'
t be taxed as heavily next spring, when the new assessments take effect, as they would have been using the higher home values assigned to them; higher assessments also would have pushed up the 1 percent cap on a homeowner's maximum property tax bill. The assessment error hasn't affected tax bills that are due next month since those are based on adjusted 2011 assessment values.The assessor has submitted the newly adjusted assessment values to the Indiana Department of Local Government Finance for review. He plans to send assessment notices to all property owners to notify them of their new values for next year's taxes by late November or early December.
http://www.indystar.com/article/20121026/NEWS/121026024/Marion-County-assessor-fixes-errors-6-000-assessments?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|IndyStar.com
