May 15, 2008

Some county assessment notification cards may contain errors

The Santa Clara County Assessor’s Office mailed more than 470,000 assessment notification cards last Friday. The card provides the property owner the opportunity to review the taxable value before it is formally enrolled on July 1 and sent to the Controller and Tax Collector to generate the 2008-09 tax bill, mailed in September.

“Regrettably, approximately 15 percent of the cards were printed with errors,” said County Assessor Larry Stone. Those printing errors appear to include incorrect property address, parcel number and/or assessed values; the mailing address was not affected.

The Assessor’s office has isolated those zip codes most likely to have received notification cards containing errors. There are no more than 12 zip codes, out of approximately 230 zip codes in the county, and it is unlikely that all property owners within these zip codes are, in fact, affected: 95112, 95113, 95115, 95116, 95117, 95118, 95119, 95120, 95121, 95122, 95123, and 95124.

The Assessor’s Office discovered has been working diligently with their printing services vendor to identify exactly how many property owners were affected. The Assessor’s Office has confirmed that the problem is confined to the physical printing of the cards; the Assessor’s internal database does not contain these errors.

“It is simply awful. We mail these cards to reduce confusion, improve customer service and increase the accuracy of the assessed values—and are one of only 10 counties that mail them. This error is likely to have the opposite effect,” said Stone.

Once the Assessor’s Office has identified which property owners received the wrong information the office plans to mail those taxpayers a corrected notification as quickly as possible.

“I am truly sorry for the confusion this has created. I am committed to making sure every property owner is notified with sufficient amount of time, so that taxpayers and our staff can focus on issues of valuation rather than printing errors.” said Stone.

Taxpayers are encouraged to wait to receive, by mail, a corrected notification rather than deluge the Assessor’s Office with phone calls. The Assessor’s Office will contact the media and update their Web site (www.sccassessor.org) once it is known which properties were impacted and the anticipated date for mailing the corrected notification card.