Cook County Property Tax Refunds
I just read on Chicago Breaking News Blog that the Cook County Assessor’s office is issuing 9.8 Million dollars in property tax refunds to 8,500 home owners in the next few weeks of 2008. Will I be one of the lucky few?
I am not holding my breath, this happens about once a year as estimations and real dollar amounts don’t always match up and I have never been on the receiving end of a refund check from Cook County in 8 years of owning a condo there. If you can’t wait to know if you will be getting an average amount (it’s never distributed that way) of $1,140 back in a property tax refund you can go look online at the Cook County Assessor’s office web site.
Go to the link on the upper right hand side of the page for refunds and enter your tax-id number (nobody has that at work though) and see if you won the lottery, er, refunds. Property taxes are high in Cook County and even higher in areas like Oak Park where the municipality adds on a ton of extra high taxes too. It is nice though that when they find an accounting error like this they actually give the money back to the tax-paying public in a tax refund check. It almost restores my hope of honesty in Chicago government a little tiny bit.