Report Review of Nassau County’s 2020/21 Reassessment of Properties

The Office of the Nassau County Comptroller released the results of its review of Nassau County’s 2020/21 Reassessment of Properties. In 2018, Nassau County conducted the widely publicized reassessment of all properties, the first in over ten years, which was published on January 2, 2019, and served as the basis of the 2020/21 and subsequent assessment rolls.

The Comptroller’s Report found that the Reassessment was conducted using stale or inaccurate data, spotlighting a deeply flawed process with errors that are perpetuated in each assessment roll since.

Key findings of the Reassessment audit include:

• Prior to performing the Reassessment, the Department of Assessment failed to fix property information and data inaccuracies previously reported to them by expert consultants.
• Twice during the Reassessment process, the County made valuation adjustments to the Reassessment without a documented audit trail and did not afford sufficient time to correctly implement these changes to the Reassessment.
• The failure to keep property values current in the years prior to the Reassessment led to a sudden jump in fair market value after the Reassessment.
• The Reassessment Phase-In Act of 2020, which phased-in increases to assessments over a 5-year period:

– Delayed the full capture of the 2020/21 Reassessment for five years, until 2024/25;

– Resulted in multiple properties, including high value homes, paying little to no property taxes beginning in 2020/21, inequitably transferring these tax responsibilities to others; and

– Resulted in inequitable taxes as it caused properties with identical 2020/21 Final Assessed Values to have differing ta responsibilities for the next four years.

• The New York State 6/20 Rule capping assessed value increases for Special Assessing Units like Nassau County, restricted the capture of the appreciation of values from the 2020/21 Reassessment.

For a deeper dive, the Comptroller’s Report can be found here: Review-of-the-2020-21-Reassessment (nassaucountyny.gov)

A prior Tax Tracker published by Will Meyer highlighted that the filing period to grieve an assessment in Nassau County commenced on January 2 with the publication of the new 2024/25 assessment roll. The deadline to complete a filing is March 1st and it behooves all property owners to review their assessments in light of the Nassau County Comptroller’s Report.

Thank you to Michael P. Guerriero for this week’s Tax Tracker post.