| Page 2 of 3 < > |
No Extra Credit for Montgomery Landlords
Curiosity over rental properties in Louis Wilen's Olney neighborhood led him to a methodical search of Montgomery County tax records.
(By Katherine Frey For The Washington Post)
TOOLBOX
   Resize
COMMENT
 Discussion Policy
 CLOSE
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain "signatures" by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Who's Blogging  |
But the inequity of landlords receiving unjustified tax credits still irked him. At home, on his computer, he revisited the issue this spring, switching between the Web site of a large real estate firm and online tax records.
"I noticed this discrepancy between homes offered for rent being listed as owner-occupied," Wilen said. "Gee, I thought, this isn't really fair."
He began compiling lists of several dozen miscoded properties at a time and sending them to the state assessment office, eventually engaging in an e-mail dialogue with a receptive bureaucrat.
"I usually do the changes the same day I receive the info," the official wrote Wilen on April 18. "When I do the change the computer sends the owner a letter to verify the information. If the owner wishes to lie on the letter I have no choice but to change it back to owner occupied."
By this time, Wilen had already e-mailed the Montgomery County Council, suggesting that the county Department of Housing and Community Affairs share its list of licensed rental properties with state assessors. Council member Marilyn Praisner (D-Eastern County), his representative, forwarded his suggestion to county housing and finance officials.
Financial programs manager Phavann Chhuan devised a way to cross-reference the housing department's list of 17,441 licensed rental properties with the tax database, yielding a spreadsheet of 2,637 rental properties coded as owner-occupied -- a little over 15 percent -- and tabulating nearly $410,000 in county tax credits for which the property owners were ineligible.
The state, which also offers tax credits, has also missed out on revenue, according to the county's analysis. In the case of the miscoded Montgomery properties, tax records show, the state lost about $73,700.
Praisner was surprised that Montgomery officials did not regularly double-check the accuracy of the tax records.
"It's something you might have assumed was going on but was not," she said.
In fact, county housing officials for the past several years have sent the assessment office an annual list of licensed rental properties. Young complained that the county transmits the information in a format -- described by county officials as an Excel spreadsheet -- that he termed incomplete and "totally unusable."
The tax credit kicks in when a homeowner with a rising assessment is faced with an annual property-tax increase in excess of Montgomery's 10 percent cap. In such cases, the county credits back any amount above 10 percent. County officials found unwarranted credits ranging from under a dollar to $1,711.06.
The cap in Prince George's is 3 percent, Young said, which may give officials there a comparatively greater incentive to ensure that credits are not misapplied. "They do it because it's in their self-interest," he said.
