Service New Brunswick not hunting for properties stung by tax scandal

More than a year after New Brunswick's new property tax system issued inflated bills to thousands of homeowners, those affected are still coming forward — although it's likely many of the properties caught up in the scandal remain unidentified, in part because no one is looking for them.

"I was very annoyed. We're retirees and I just thought, 'Oh my,'" said Hazel Robichaud, who was hit with a $296 tax increase on her Chartersville Road home in Dieppe last year that was only recently dealt with by Service New Brunswick.

Property assessments on Chartersville Road last year were a mess.  At least 40 property owners filed objections to their tax bills and 80 per cent of those were successful.

But not Robichaud.

It took 15 months for her and her husband to win a retraction of most of their increase.

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Service New Brunswick did not have a record of them objecting to the tax hike — and was doing nothing to find people like them who it had overcharged, but who were seemingly not objecting.

"My husband did [try to] appeal last year but didn't press the [submit] button on the computer. We didn't realize it didn't go through," said Robichaud in explaining how they didn't catch Service New Brunswick's attention until this year.

Once they've had a significant amount of appeals then maybe they should look at the whole street.- Hazel Robichaud, homeowner

But with dozens of confirmed assessment and tax mistakes among her neighbours on Chartersville, Robichaud asks why Service New Brunswick wasn't hunting for people like her on its own — looking to fix the mistake it had to know it made on her home, whether she objected or not.

"Once they've had a significant amount of appeals then maybe they should look at the whole street," said Robichaud.

"I feel they all should have been reassessed and everyone treated fairly."

Several dozen properties on Chartersville Road received tax increases above 10 per cent last year and a large percentage of those did not file an objection to the increase.

'Pockets' of problem areas

Service New Brunswick did not respond Monday to questions about what steps it has been taking to identify properties hit with excessive tax increases last year, but whose owners have not yet come forward.

However, in March the agency acknowledged it knows where most of the problem areas are, since low quality property assessments that generated inflated tax bills last year were often clustered in certain neighbourhoods, like on the Chartersville Road.

"The bottom line is, yes, there were pockets last year. That is not normal," said Stephen Ward, Service New Brunswick's director of assessment.

Property owners are still emerging from those pockets of bad assessments on their own.

Glenna Greene and her husband own a house on Saunders Street in Fredericton — another problem area — and recently won a reduction of their property tax bill after coming forward a year late.

"It was quite a good drop," said Greene of the $360 tax reduction.

Auditor general called for changes

Still, although the assessment errors may originate with Service New Brunswick, the onus to have them fixed rests with property owners.

And if property owners are not aware of what happened or are nervous about challenging a government body over a tax issue, little effort is made on their behalf.

Last fall, Auditor General Kim MacPherson criticized Service New Brunswick for relying too heavily on property owners to report mistakes and called on the agency to develop quality controls that would turn up errors in a different way.

"In [the] AGNB's view, it is inappropriate to rely on request for review submissions [from property owners] as the only mechanism of quality assurance for billing accuracy," said MacPherson in her report.