Kenai Peninsula Borough staff to refund tax overcharges after clerical errors on two oil-and-gas accounts

At a Kenai Peninsula Borough Finance Committee meeting, staff reported that two oil-and-gas real property accounts were billed with 2023 values instead of 2024, and the committee considered resolution 2025-016 to correct the manifest clerical errors and approve a refund in excess of $10,000.

Miss Wilcox, a staff member, told the committee that an internal audit found the error. “These accounts are hand entered. . . . Last year, we had a hiccup with . . . our commercial vendor, and it sent out an error message, so we had to reboot our system. What we did not know at the time is when it rebooted the system, it defaulted back to the previous year's values, and we didn't catch that until we audited for this year to update those values,” she said.

Wilcox said the accounts involved are not on the automatic database and must be hand-calculated each year. She told the committee the borough has only seven hand-calculated accounts in total and that two of those had this error. The memo presented with the resolution says the correct assessment notice was mailed for 2024, but the tax bill used updated 2023 values, so the borough would issue refunds to the affected taxpayers.

When asked about protections to prevent recurrence, Wilcox said the assessing staff “put another audit query in place that automatically looks at those hand calculated accounts.” Committee members asked clarifying questions about the direction of the taxes (Miss Eklund confirmed the 2024 taxes were less than 2023, prompting refunds) and the mechanics of depreciation and assessments.

The resolution was listed on the consent agenda. No committee vote or final outcome on the resolution is recorded in the committee transcript excerpt.