A report on errors in property assessments by the Cook County assessor’s office includes this summary of Illinois legislation:

State law allows county assessors to back-tax property owners for up to three years of missed assessments, even when the homeowners did nothing wrong.

This can have serious consequences:

A homeowner in Northbrook was hit with a nearly $7,800 bill in back taxes this year after the home, built by 2022, was added to the rolls in 2023. The assessor’s office had the permit data on file, records show.

That homeowner’s next door neighbor was hit even harder…

Finished in 2020, it sold for nearly $1.4 million the same year. The owners paid less than $1,800 in property taxes last year because the assessor’s office listed it as vacant land for three years before realizing their error.

Their bill this year: more than $93,000. The sum includes more than $67,000 in back taxes.

In an even more extreme case, Kaegi’s office classified an $11 million lakefront house in Winnetka as vacant until 2022, even though its construction was completed in 2020. This year, its owner owes $651,346 in property taxes, including more than $370,000 in back taxes from 2020 and 2021 — more than 4% of all property taxes being collected by the village of Winnetka this year.

The bulk of the story is about the difficulty the assessor’s office has had in keeping up with current property values. From it not being the top priority to not being able to keep up with all the data they have to not getting the data in the first place, it sounds like there are multiple areas to improve in.

So I wonder about the consequences of this passed along to property owners. They might have choices in local elections about who is in this position. They tend to assume the local government is doing their job. Yet I would guess this position is not the radar screen of most people. They might not be very aware of how to appeal their taxes or how their taxes are calculated. They get their taxes each year and pay the bill.

There is even a story in the article about a property owner who realized their taxes were probably low and tried to ask about it. Nothing happened.

If property taxes are important to local government – and I know they are – then it would behoove them to be on top of assessing properties, collecting taxes, and working with the public.