By: Erin Smith
The Bladen County Board of Commissioners met on Monday night for a special session to address requests from taxpayers and approved a motion to request Institute of Government Chris McLaughlin to review the matter. Bladen County Tax Administrator/Assessor Rene Davis said that for taxpayers were requesting waivers on land.
She explained that for tax year 2007 and prior years, the taxpayer was billed per their account number. She said by doing this, a landowner could have several parcels of land attached to one account number. Davis told the board that in 2008, the procedure changed and from tax year 2008 and forward, the tax payer is billed by the parcel number. Once the change was made, taxpayers were billed for each individual parcel.
“If you pull up (a property) by the parcel number on the (tax department) website, you only pull up everything from 2008 to the present,” said Davis.
She said as a result, Attorney Jim Hill has written letter requesting a tax refund and the release of a 2007 tax lien for a client’s property. Davis said that Hill performed a search on the tax department’s website but he did not initially find a tax bill for the property in question dated from 2007. Davis said Hill was using the parcel number to search the tax data base and did not find the past due tax bill.
Davis said when Hill’s client received a past due notice for the 2007 tax bill, he notified Hill who paid the tax bill. Davis said since then, Hill has requested a full refund of the amount which was $1,170.12 and is also requesting a release of the tax lien on his client’s property.
Davis said the county had a similar incident in the past but the board chose to only waive the interest owed on the account.
After further discussion and learning there were three other requests for folks in similar situations on the agenda, Commissioner Charles Ray Peterson made a motion to have Davis contact Chris McLaughlin at the Institute of Government and request he look into it and offer some guidance. The motion was approved.
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