A suburban Chicago homeowner was “devastated” when a clerical error made his property tax bill skyrocket from $1,800 to over $30,000, but local reports say he isn’t the only victim.
“I was literally devastated,” the homeowner, Darryl Lloyd, told FOX 32 in Chicago.
Lloyd lives in Chicago Heights, an unincorporated Chicago metropolitan area suburb where he purchased his 1950s home for $115,000 in 2006.
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According to the Daily Mail, the single-floor home is 960 square feet and valued at approximately $180,000. An erroneous property assessment, however, brought its value to over $1 million.
“There’s nothing over here worth anything near $1 million,” he told the local media outlet of his neighborhood.
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The outlet reported that a representative from the Cook County Assessor’s Office acknowledged a permit had been erroneously added to Lloyd’s property, creating the sharply inflated number and, though the window to appeal that tax bill has passed, they plan to process a corrected bill for the property soon.
At the same time, thousands of other Chicagoans have seen property tax errors, according to an analysis released by the Cook County Treasurer’s Office.
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“More than a month before tax bills were to be mailed, the Assessor’s Office acknowledged it erred in calculating land values for more than 4,400 homes in the south and southwest suburbs. That led to severe overassessments for homes on larger plots of land,” the analysis read.
“The errors were discovered too late in the process for them to be corrected before tax bills were calculated, printed and mailed. The 4,400 erroneous bills were put on hold pending corrections, with the hope they could still be completed by the July 2 mailing deadline,” it continued.
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