One of our readers asked "can I appeal my Fulton County property taxes even when the don't send an assessment?" Given that I practice law primarily as a Georgia wrongful death attorney, I went to Hal Roach, a property tax assessor who handles appeals for Georgia Property Tax assessments and has twenty years of government experience.
As we discussed in the previous article on how to appeal your Fulton County and City of Atlanta taxes, you need to have a Change of Assessment notice sent to you to trigger your right to file an appeal. So if they are not raising your assessment, you normally won't get the Change of Assessment notice. But, there is a way around that problem.
According to Mr. Roach, if you file a Taxpayers's Return of Real Property then the County will have to send a “Change of Assessment” notice regardless of whether the property value was reassessed. The notice may contain a change or no change in value, but it gives you the right to file an appeal under the time lines we previously discussed.
Hal reminds us that:
1) In most counties the window in which you can appeal is from January 1st to April 1st. Bibb, Butts, Chatham, Clarke, DeKalb, Gwinnett, Hall and Newton counties require a filing from January 1st to March 1st.
2) Make sure to timely file the appeal when you get the "Change of Assessment Notice” You can always withdraw your appeal at any time, but failure to file waives it for the year.
3) With property values dropping and the legislature freezing reassessments until 2011, you will have to be proactive to get the Change of Assessment sent.
4) Recent legislation forces the County Assessors to take foreclosure and short sales into account as market values and that will drastically force down the assessment values.
If you have further questions, please check out Hal Roach's blog on Georgia Property tax appeals at http://www.hometaxrep.com/.
