Officials with a local municipality may be facing a major overhaul of their tax roll.
Amanda Mombourquette, the warden of Richmond Co., say Michael Diggdon, the municipality’s deputy warden, discovered 50 or 60 residential property owners weren’t paying the correct taxes.
Mombourquette tells The Hawk they’re taking a hard look at their tax roll after they found dozens of properties missing from the list.
“Of the sample group of properties, the majority came back as needing new assessment numbers added,” she says. “That was kind of a wake-up call for us.”
Mombourquette says staff members and councillors are focused on the budget now, but this is important.
She says the extent of the issue isn’t clear yet, so they’ve directed staff members to investigate once budget deliberations are finished.
“What is the best way to understand what, like I said, what the scope of the problem is, and then how to tackle it,” she says. “We want to make sure that we’re taxing people consistently- you don’t want to be the person next door to another landowner that doesn’t pay any tax because he doesn’t have an assessment account number.”
Mombourquette says they’re not going to send corrected tax bills or try to collect back taxes for the historical error, but they want to fix the issue to ensure fairness moving forward.
