The city took responsibility Friday for errors that resulted in faulty tax bills mailed to nearly 8,000 Baltimore homeowners, and officials say a task force is brainstorming ways to ensure such mistakes don't happen again.
About 6,100 homeowners were mistakenly sent notices last week that they were overdue on their property taxes for the tax year that just ended — by thousands of dollars, in some cases. Almost 1,800 others received a bill with the wrong amount for the current tax year.
One homeowner said she mailed a check after being assured by both city and state workers last week that the past-due notice was not a mistake. The city Bureau of Revenue Collections, which believes few residents paid the bills, promised to promptly send refunds.
The problems cropped up even though the agency performed a quality-control check on 2,100 bills last month, aimed at avoiding just this sort of headache.
City officials clarified Friday that they realized from the start that a city information-technology error caused the 1,800 inaccurate bills for the current tax year. But they originally believed that the wrong past-due bills were the result of a mistake by the state, which supplies the assessment data that local tax collectors use to generate bills.
Owen C. Charles, supervisor of the state assessment office in Baltimore, said a review of affected property accounts in the state's database found no errors. Ryan O'Doherty, spokesman for Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, said Friday that the city tracked down the problem to its Office of Information Technology.
"There was a processing error," said O'Doherty, who characterized the software system involved as an old one the city is trying to update. "Right now, everybody's working very hard to make sure that future mistakes don't occur."
The city finance department director, Edward J. Gallagher, put together a task force to improve quality control, O'Doherty said. Henry J. Raymond, director of the department's revenue collections bureau, said plans are under way to automate some tasks now done by hand and expand the quality-control effort.
Workers double-checked a sample of bills against the electronic records in June before sending annual notices to all homeowners. But they couldn't have turned up the billing problems by doing so because some errors were in the city records themselves and others had not yet occurred, Raymond said.
The first mistake affected the smaller group of homeowners. The wrong amount for a low-income tax credit was applied to their accounts, Raymond said.
"Corrected bills were prepared, and that was where the second error was introduced," he said. "Both issues were human error."
The second mistake involved switched dates on city records in a way that affected 6,100 property owners' Homestead Tax Credit for the 2009-2010 tax year. The credit is for owners who have lived in their homes for one full tax year. Most of those affected by the glitch are new buyers who must wait until July 1 of next year to qualify for the credit, but because they legally inherited the previous owner's credit through June 30 of this year, they have already enjoyed some benefit from it.
The tax year on those records was accidentally changed, Raymond said, and it suddenly appeared that they'd had no credits in either year — which prompted bills for the supposedly past-due amounts.
That's what happened to Anna McCrerey, who bought her home near Charles Village last July. She said she spent a "miserable" three hours on the telephone last week — first with the city, then the state — trying to find out why she suddenly owed an extra $738. She was told the credit had been wrongly applied to her account to begin with.
So she paid up.
"I don't have a significant amount of money, but I have a small amount of savings," said McCrerey, 28. "So Monday, I put the check in the mail."
By Thursday morning, the city had cashed it. McCrerey, reading The Baltimore Sun later in the day, was "horrified" to learn that the bill was apparently among the thousands of incorrect notices officials had flagged. She got back on the phone to try to get her money returned.
The mayor's spokesman, asked about her situation, had the tax-collections chief quickly call her with a promise to resolve it.
"He assured me they would expedite my refund and was extremely apologetic," said McCrerey, who said she felt better about the ordeal.
Larry Clark, director of professional development at the International Association of Assessing Officers, says it's not that unusual for jurisdictions to send out some property-tax bills that aren't right.
It's the same phenomenon that produces mistakes on any sort of bill, government or corporate: Opportunities for human error and computer hiccups in databases are endless.
"I've heard of instances where, for example, someone will be entering the value on a specific property and let their finger rest on the zero, so instead of it being $10,000, it's $1 million or $10 million," Clark said.
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Incorrect city tax bills
If you received one of the wrong bills for the tax year that began July 1, you should have already received the corrected statement in the mail.
Residents who were wrongly sent past-due notices last week for the tax year that ended June 30 should receive notices setting the record straight next week, the city says.
Henry J. Raymond, chief of the city Bureau of Revenue Collections, said the city also will check its records next week to find people who paid an incorrect bill and "expedite their refunds." Homeowners do not have to call to get their money back, he said, but may do so if they choose. The agency is directing those calls to 410-396-3987.
The city expects that all accounts will be corrected next week. To check yours, go to http://cityservices.baltimorecity.gov/realproperty.