Just when you think the Cook County government could not get any stranger, we find out that property owners are getting notices of so-called “omitted assessments” for back taxes, even when the incorrect assessment was not their fault, and for years when current owners hadn’t yet purchased the property.

It is not just a few of these oddball bills that have gone out. In the last two years they have increased by 300% covering 7,000 back tax years.

If the Pyramids and the Sphinx were located in Cook County, they might be subject to an omitted assessment back-tax notice.

And who’s at fault? Not Mr. and Mrs. Taxpayer, that’s for sure, although they are the ones who end up paying the back-tax assessments—or a lawyer to defend against them.

When the Illinois Department of Revenue and the Cook County recorder of deeds notify the Cook County assessor’s office that a formerly tax-exempt property has been purchased by someone who is not tax-exempt, the property is supposed to promptly go back on the tax rolls.

Sometimes it does not, and when the error is discovered years later, a back-tax bill goes out.

When improvements and additions are made by property owners, municipal officials are supposed to inform the assessor’s office promptly.

Again sometimes that does not happen, with the errors found and the bills issued later.

So after all this government ineptitude, taxpayers get stuck with the bill. And up until now, they had only 21 days to appeal instead of the usual 30, and could not appeal to another government agency.
The County’s attitude: we messed up, so you pay.

State Representative Arthur Turner tried to give taxpayers some relief by attempting to fix some of the more odious portions of this process. The State Senate passed his bill, but not the State House.

We applaud Rep. Turner for his actions, but we also ask, why is this Cook County property tax reign of error going on in the first place? Is it so hard for government agencies to communicate with each other and for information to be logged promptly and accurately in this computer age?

After November, we will have a new Cook County assessor and a new Cook County Board president. We urge both of them to make the obscure but important issue of omitted assessments a priority. Cleaning up this problem would go a long way in proving that new leaders really do want to get away from business-as-usual in the bizarre world of Cook County government.