NYC Tax Commission Issues 2017 Annual Report

A new report from the NYC Tax Commission for fiscal 2017 shows the independent agency received 54,730 applications to review property tax assessments by March 2017. These applications covered 211,034 separately assessed tax lots, having an aggregate assessed value of $223,161,504,033. According to the Tax Commission, this represented an almost 26 percent increase in the number of applications since 2008 and about 98.6 percent of the total 2017/18 tentative taxable assessed value of all city properties in all tax classes.            

In 2017, the Tax Commission provided substantive hearings on 29,165 applications. The Tax Commission took remedial actions that, in the aggregate, granted $5,113,834,75512 in assessment reductions for the 2017/18 tax year, yielding approximately $577,025,000 in tax relief for that year. In conjunction with its disposition of 2017 applications, the Tax Commission also obtained discontinuances of 19,999 pending Article 7 judicial review proceedings claiming errors in assessments for prior years.

Applicants may seek judicial review of assessments confirmed by the Tax Commission by filing an Article 7 petition in the New York State Supreme Court in the appropriate county by Oct. 24 and serving the petition on the Tax Commission. State law does not require the courts to give any deference to the Tax Commission’s determination.

In 2017, the City Corporation Counsel’s Office, which represents the Tax Commission in Article 7 proceedings, settled approximately 676 Article 7 proceedings resulting in about $709 million in assessment reductions. In recent years, the courts, after trial, have issued few judgments disposing of Article 7 proceedings. In 2017, there were only two Article 7 petitions taken to trial and decided by the courts, granting about $5,400 in assessment reductions.