Are City’s Property Tax Notices “Incompetent”?

As we all learned in grade school, multiply any number by zero and the answer always comes back zero. Apparently, the number-crunchers inside the city’s Department of Finance (DOF) skipped school that day.

Consider the DOF’s annual Notice of Property Value, which has just gone out to owners of all buildings in the city’s four classes of property taxes (co-ops and condos are in Class 2). The notice lists each property’s figures for the current tax year (July 1, 2016 to June 30, 2017), including its market value, assessment percentage, actual assessed value, transitional assessed value, and exemption value – all of which combine to produce the property’s taxable value. There are also projected figures in each of these categories for the upcoming tax year (July 1, 2017 to June 30, 2018).

Now comes the weird part. The notice continues, “Estimate your property taxes for 2017-18 by multiplying your Taxable Value by the current tax rate, and then subtract abatements. The result will be an estimate of your property taxes for 2017-18.”

Only trouble is, there is no mention of the current tax rate anywhere on the form. So if you multiply your Taxable Value by nothing, the result will always be nothing. Since this is New York City, a property tax bill of zero is obviously an impossibility. But how could something so basic be omitted from the Notice of Property Value?

“Incompetence,” says a veteran co-op and condo tax attorney, speaking on condition of anonymity because he does a lot of business with DOF.

Sonia Alleyne, a spokeswoman for DOF, sees it differently. “The reason we don’t put the tax rate on the Notice of Property Value is because it’s not a bill,” she says. “Apparently, part of the strategy is to get people to go to the website, where there’s a lot more information, including a section on how to calculate your tax bill.”

That website is here. And here's a primer on why the city's method of assessing property taxes is so convoluted and resistant to reform.

Alleyne welcomes publicity for the Notice of Property Value. “A lot of people ignore it because it’s not a bill,” she says, “but if you believe there’s a discrepancy in your taxable value, you can challenge it.”

Co-op shareholders and condo unit-owners have until March 1 to challenge their assessed values. Now is the time to start crunching the numbers.