Kootenai County commissioners order corrected tax bills after data-transfer error

Kootenai County commissioners on June 2 instructed the treasurer to send corrected tax bills and offer a 12-month payment option for 13 parcels after a data-transfer error left assessed values at zero in the county’s roll, county officials said.

The corrected notices respond to an error in the county’s assessment-to-tax workflow that caused values entered after Board of Equalization (BOE) actions to fail to transfer from the appraisal system into the tax/cadastral system, producing $0 entries used to generate parts of the tax roll. Second-half property taxes are due June 20.

“it came to my office's attention back in, November of 20 24 that we had an issue with some of the parcels that were, their values were adjusted as part of the BOE process last summer,” Jill Smith, chief deputy treasurer, said during the meeting. Smith told the board the assessor’s office had joined the conversation in December and that the county has not yet completed the technical correction needed to bring the two systems back into alignment.

Dyson, a county staff member, described how the problem arose in the interface between two systems: “The only thing I would add in, commissioners, is the thing that happened with these is that they were posted correctly in our system. … We have ProVal on one side which is how we do assessment and then we have Momentum which is how everything is handled as far as cadastral and taxes and whatnot. Those two things talk to each other through a system called PVI … For these properties, there was no error message and the value went to 0.”

Commissioners were told the combined assessed value for the affected parcels is $19,563,615 and that one property faces a roughly $37,000 tax bill when corrected. The board voted to authorize the treasurer to send corrected tax notices showing the BOE-determined values and to offer affected taxpayers a 12-month payment option without interest or penalties through an amortization, to reduce disruption to mortgage escrows and property owners.

The motion to instruct the treasurer to send corrected notices for items 1–13 and to provide a 12‑month payment option was seconded by Commissioner Evelyn and recorded as “aye” by Commissioner Duncan and Chair McPherson. The board recorded the motion as carried.

Assessor John Kovacs (identified in the meeting as Assessor Kovacs) told commissioners he had discussed the issue with the vendor XTR and that a configuration change outside the assessor’s office contributed to the failure to move values into the tax roll: “I did have an extensive conversation with XTR,” Kovacs said. He said the vendor advised that making back-end edits on the assessor side would be time-consuming and might not be the best fix, given the systems’ interaction.

County staff described short-term and longer-term steps. In the short term, the treasurer’s office will generate corrected tax bills using the BOE values already documented, then provide payment options to taxpayers. In the meeting, a treasurer’s office representative said the office would avoid cancelling taxes and instead send revised bills with the extended payment option so that property owners are billed on the values the BOE set.

Commissioners and staff also agreed to handle one parcel (item 13) separately if needed; staff identified that parcel as a cell-phone tower that had a value in 2023, was missed in 2024, and will have value in 2025. Jill Smith and others said they would dig further into why that parcel had a zero value for 2024. Smith also raised two additional parcels that were affected because they were inactive during the occupancy‑roll calculation; those parcels currently show land value at zero for the second half and will be brought back for a status update so the assessor can provide background.

Staff discussed technical safeguards to catch similar errors going forward, including running reports to flag any property with a $0 value in the final cadastral tables and cross-checks between the appraisal and tax systems. Commissioners suggested adding a verification step after BOE adjustments are posted to ensure the values arrive in the tax system before bills are generated.

The board did not cancel taxes for any parcel. Rather, commissioners authorized corrective billing and a 12‑month payment option while staff pursue technical fixes and further review of the cell-tower parcel and the two occupancy-roll parcels.

The treasurer’s office and assessor will follow up with additional information at a future status update requested by the board.