Cook County Assesor manipulating property taxes

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So the Tribune stepped in, compiling and analyzing more than 100 million property tax records from the years 2003 through 2015, along with thousands of pages of documents, then vetting the findings with top experts in the field. The process took more than a year. The conclusion: Residential assessments have been so far off the mark for so many years that the credibility of the entire property tax system is in doubt.

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In 2014, for instance, a building on Oak Street in the Gold Coast neighborhood sold for $14.9 million. The next year, the assessor’s office valued the building at $3.6 million — less than a quarter of the sales price. A year after that, in 2016, the building sold for even more: $23 million.

Eight miles west, a small industrial shop in the working-class Belmont Central neighborhood sold for $110,000 in 2015. The assessor’s estimate that year was $207,140, nearly double the sale price.

The effects of flawed commercial and industrial valuations aren’t limited to people who own businesses. Owners of residential properties, as a group, also ended up paying more in property taxes than they would have if the assessor’s office had done its work properly.

The total amount of property taxes levied in a given year is fixed, so if one group of property owners doesn’t pay its fair share, others have to make up the difference. And for years, the county has significantly undervalued commercial and industrial properties as a class, according to the ProPublica Illinois-Chicago Tribune analysis as well as studies conducted by the Illinois Department of Revenue.

That means the estimated total value of those properties, after appeals, was on average less than it should have been.

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