The East Baton Rouge Parish Assessor’s Office is spearheading a program aimed at ferreting out illegally claimed homestead exemptions in the city-parish, which will give a boost to agencies that rely on property tax revenue for their operating budgets.
Agencies have until Feb. 15 to decide whether to join the program and be eligible to receive the money. Assessor Brian Wilson says four fire departments in the parish—Alsen, Pride, Hooper Road and Zachary—have joined so far.
The work of finding the illegal homestead exemptions will be contracted out to Charlotte, North Carolina-based Tax Management Associates, which specializes in finding people who illegally claim a homestead exemption. The contract has not been signed yet and will not cost the city-parish agencies a penny, Wilson says. However, the company is paid 40% of any back taxes collected, while the city-parish agencies will receive the other 60%.
“It will be found money that will pay for itself,” Wilson says.
Wilson says Tax Management Associates normally finds about 2% of homestead exemptions in any parish, county or municipality are illegally claimed. More than 101,000 property owners claim the exemption in East Baton Rouge Parish, he adds.
Once the company completes its work, which Wilson says could take a few months, then notices will be sent to homeowners identified as using the exemption illegally. Those homeowners will be allowed to fight the claims, Wilson says.
The Assessor’s Office has the authority to assess back property taxes for up to three years, but Wilson says they will only go back one year. Wilson says his office has never done anything like this in his 13 years as assessor because it does not have the resources that Tax Management Associates has to perform the sweep of the tax rolls.
“We do our best, but this is what this company does,” Wilson says, adding it could take his office five years to check every home in the parish for homestead exemption fraud.
Louisiana’s homestead exemption allows residents who own a home that is their primary residence to have the first $75,000 of their property’s value exempt when assessing property taxes. Residents living inside Baton Rouge, Baker, Zachary and Central, must still pay city millages because the homestead exemption does not cover those, Wilson says.
The Capital Area Transit System Board of Commissioners will vote at its meeting this afternoon on whether the transit agency will join in the program. Spokeswoman Amie McNaylor says the item came up at a recent CATS Finance and Executive Committee meeting, but was not voted on due to a lack of a quorum because the Metro Council had not appointed new members to replace those whose terms had expired. But she says the two who did attend indicated they support the measure.
—Ryan Broussard
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