Missed Tax Appeal Deadlines May Cost County : Government: Several hundred property owners failed to get timely hearings of assessment challenges. Officials scramble to learn the fiscal ramifications.

County officials are frantically scrambling to size up the potential damage after learning that they might have to refund tax dollars to several hundred property owners for failing to hear their assessment appeals within the legal deadline.

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“We’ll be working through the weekend so we can determine the magnitude of the problem,” County Administrator Ernie Schneider said Thursday.

The investigation was launched after an assessment appeals board ruled Monday that the county must accept the Bank of America’s valuation of a property in Brea that was about $100 million less than the county claimed, because the county missed a Sept. 15 cutoff date to hold an appeals hearing.

By violating a state law requiring appeals to be heard within two years, county officials figure, the county now will be obliged to refund to Bank of America $1 million a year for up to three years, the period between the date the county assessor received the bank’s notice of appeal and the next reassessment of the property.

Schneider said it has been estimated that assessment appeals for as many as 300 other parcels also may be near or past the deadline. Most of these properties are residences, which means the tax dollars in dispute won’t be nearly as great as in the Bank of America case.

He said he is investigating to find how the Bank of America mishap occurred and who might be responsible. He said he would have expected the county clerk to schedule the hearing before the expiration date, but he would also have expected the assessor’s caseworker to be aware of upcoming deadlines.

County Assessor Bradley L. Jacobs denied any blame Thursday, pointing at the supervisors and the county clerk.

“The assessor department does not handle the appeals process,” Jacobs said. “Under the laws of the state, the appeals process is handled by the Board of Supervisors in their duty as a local board of equalization, and they appoint the hearing board.

“The clerk is the officer of the administrative proceedings, handles schedules and is responsible to obtain waivers.”

Phyllis Henderson, the county clerk, was unavailable for comment Thursday. However, other county officials said she had a written opinion, issued previously by the county counsel’s office, that she is not responsible for alerting the assessor to pending deadlines.

Supervisor William G. Steiner said he was upset by the amount of “finger-pointing.”

“It appears to me that authority has been divided between the assessor and the clerk of the board, and if that is true, it’s pretty difficult to hold people accountable. People start playing the blame game.”

Steiner added that the loss of county revenues in the Bank of America case represented “a significant amount of money, especially when our budget is already strained.”

He said he was surprised by the situation, particularly because the board “led the effort to get the clerk of the board and the assessor the resources they needed to deal with their very heavy workload. . . . I don’t understand why this has occurred.”

Supervisor Roger R. Stanton said he also would like “to get a straight answer.”

“It seems we can’t associate a name and face with this misdeed,” he said. “There has to be some accountability. People shouldn’t be allowed to hide behind this shroud of bureaucracy.”

Stanton equated the county to a business that has taken steps to reduce its expenditures and work force, then “fails to collect on its accounts receivable.”

Jacobs acknowledged that the county has been struggling to keep up with a flood of appeals that has hit the assessor’s office since a real estate recession sent property values plummeting.

He said his office has held or reduced assessments on 257,000 properties this year. In addition, he said his office has resolved 27,000 appeals of the 1992 and 1993 tax assessment rolls.

Nonetheless, Schneider said, the county is working through a backlog of 36,000 remaining appeals.

“Of those, 300 have somehow fallen through the cracks,” he said. Henderson, the county clerk, was unable to find the original copies of those appeals to check whether the appeals review time has lapsed, Schneider said.

Schneider said Henderson contends that the assessor’s office neglected to send them to her. Cary Walker, a spokesman for Bank of America, denied that the bank will be receiving a windfall from the county’s oversight.

“I think it’s been suggested that Orange County will lose a considerable amount of tax revenue because it failed to grant in a timely manner a hearing that the Bank of America was entitled to,” he said. “But that assumes the county’s $119.8-million valuation would have prevailed at the hearing. In fact, we believe our valuation of $23.9 million is the correct one.”

He said the property, which became excess with the merger of Bank of America and Security Pacific, is now on the market at an asking price of $55 million.