Tag: Appraisal district

Elizabeth Gutierrez worked extra jobs and overtime for 15 years to get her red brick one-story home paid down in half the time. She is semi-retired from her clerical job, but never lost the habitual organization that made her so valuable throughout her career.

Gutierrez diligently tends to bills and opens every letter she receives in the mail — much of which someone else would throw in the bin without a second thought.

On April 1, Gutierrez was stunned to learn she would have her homestead exemption revoked if she didn’t protest by the end of the month. According to the letter, she had been renting out her River Oaks home and would need to pay $2,600 in back taxes for the past three years.

But Gutierrez was not renting out her home. She was one of 18,000 Tarrant County homeowners the appraisal district’s new auditing system erroneously flagged as having an invalid homestead exemption.

The house she lives in is warm and tidy, with pillows overflowing on the couches in her small living room. She’s lived there since 2000 and has never rented it out to anyone, though she considered it when her mother was nearing the end of her life. In 2017, she posted the house on Zillow thinking it best to move in with her mother so she could tend to her.

She ultimately decided against that plan and tried to remove the listing, but Gutierrez could only deactivate it.

Several years later, when she applied for her homestead exemption and subsequently her over-65 exemption, the deactivated listing was never a point of contention. But with the appraisal district’s new system designed to catch ineligible exemptions, that changed.

Chicago-based TrueRoll developed a system that scrapes thousands of datasets to ensure each homestead exemption is aptly granted. Homestead exemptions remove a portion of the taxable value of a home and result in tax breaks for people who live in their homes. Other exemptions are available for disabled veterans, seniors or first responders’ widows.

In the first year of use, the system flagged 27,000 of 424,000 homesteads, according to TAD Chief Appraiser Joe Don Bobbitt. Only a third of those flagged exemptions were accurate.

Gutierrez was one of the 18,000 homeowners who received a letter wrongly stating she was ineligible for an exemption and that she would need to reapply.

Despite protesting the revocation with proof that she’d lived in her house throughout the three years TAD said she hadn’t, the bill for back taxes still came 10 days later.

The money was due on May 31, and with only a small pension as income, the amount was enough to take her breath away.

As tears began to collect in her eyes, she asked God for wisdom and guidance. It’s the same prayer she’s recited every day for most of her life.

“I’m a woman of faith, and so I just said, ‘Lord, you’re going to have to help me with this, because I don’t know what to do,’” Gutierrez said. “He reminded me that I had a friend, Chandler Crouch and (his assistant) Jennifer, that would help me through this.”

Crouch, a Fort Worth tax consultant, helps hundreds of Tarrant County residents with protesting their appraisals at no cost and is a fixture at TAD meetings. He explained that once the appraisal district believes a tax exemption had been improperly granted, the burden of proof lies on the taxpayer.

Armed with letters from Gutierrez’s electric, gas and water providers, Crouch and his assistant were able to convince the appraisal district that it was mistaken. They were told nothing could be done to halt the bills, and Gutierrez would need to pay them while the exemptions were being reinstated.

By dipping into her untouched savings account, Gutierrez got the bill paid to avoid the amount increasing with fees and penalties. She didn’t see that money again until July and was wrought with stress until the refund came.

Crouch estimated that he had 10 clients who also had their exemptions revoked, though some were more “entertaining” than others.

“I think the cases that are more entertaining are the ones where the appraisal district sends out a notice to inform the homeowner that they are, in fact, dead, and the living homeowner has to then inform the appraisal district that they are not, in fact, the dead,” Crouch said. “They are living in and still there. Those are more entertaining, because the absurdity is off the charts.”

Crouch said it’s never right to take exemptions away incorrectly.

“With that said, we understand there are going to be some errors, inevitably,” Crouch said. “It’s unavoidable, because we don’t live in a perfect world. However, the appraisal district needs to do everything they can to make sure that they are not taking away people’s exemptions unless it’s quite certain that it’s being incorrectly applied.”

Fortunately, Crouch said, the leaders of the Tarrant Appraisal District are reasonable and compassionate.

Bobbitt said TAD is still learning how much it can trust the flags from TrueRoll. He said the appraisal district reviews each of the flags, but if it can’t determine the accuracy, it asks the homeowner to renew their exemption application.

“Sometimes it’s informational, we’ll request information, and sometimes, if we have enough information, then we’ll just go and send them a letter saying we’re denying their exemption,” Bobbitt said. “And then they have 30 days from that point to basically get in touch with us and file a protest.”

Bobbitt said though they may have put too much trust in the system at first, the appraisal district has made improvements and will continue to refine the process to minimize errors moving forward.