Outrageous! Little Guy gets the shaft while the Fat Cats make out like bandits | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Publisher's Note: This article originally appeared in the Beaufort Observer.

    The Beaufort County Board of Commissioners was a study in contrasts Monday night as they heard a report from Tax Assessor Bobby Parker. On the one hand they debated whether the county should aggressively purse collecting several hundred dollars from a tax payer who is delinquent on her taxes for her home and in the same segment of the meeting heard that 119 taxpayers, most of whom are expected to be large corporations or businesses, have "avoided" nearly $65 million in taxes over the last decade.

    And that is apparently only the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

    Here's the deal. Most of us pay real estate property taxes on real property that is assessed and the tax levied, without us having to do anything. They put a value on our real estate and each year send us a tax bill determined by the rate the Board of Commissioners set. If you don't pay those taxes you cannot sell your property with a clear title until you do pay them. So the county usually collects most of the real estate taxes at some point. The county can foreclose on a person's property, seize it and sell it on the courthouse steps for whatever someone will pay for it. They then take their cut of the proceeds for the taxes and the taxpayer gets the remainder, after legal fees etc. come out. But eventually the county collects real estate taxes.

    Personal property is another matter. Personal property is vehicles, machinery and equipment etc. That property has to be "listed" by the taxpayer. They are supposed to list it when they acquire it at the value they pay for it, with some exceptions (of course.) But the problem comes when a business does not list everything; or when it lists the property at less than its true taxable value.

    The county collects personal property on vehicles, usually because you have to pay them before you can renew the license tags for the vehicle. But business equipment is another matter.

    So Beaufort County hired an outside "tax auditing" firm that has scrutinized the tax rolls and for some accounts they have audited the financial records of the "taxpayer," again typically businesses. They have been at the task for about a year now. Mr. Parker gave a preliminary report Monday night that showed that the firm has audited 385 of the approximately 8,000 accounts and discovered that 119 accounts have a value of $64,517,055 that was not listed on the tax rolls. They found 266 of the accounts to be correctly listing their taxes. Those 119 taxpayers have been billed $556,572.

    The audit company is paid a commission on what it discovers. That commission amounted to $191,035, leaving the county with a net gain of $365,537 thus far. Again, the report was an interim report and more will surely be forthcoming.

    So don't miss the point here: Beaufort County has failed to collect taxes on at least $65 million dollars over the last decade. And it cannot legally collect anything more than five years old. So presumably there will be as much tax revenue lost as there will be collected in this process.

    Yet this same county will, as Commissioner Ed Booth and Gary Brinn pointed out, put pressure--under threat of confiscation of person's property--because a person owes a few hundred dollars.

    Commentary

    We find this revelation to be absolutely outrageous. Surely someone in county management knew or should have known that a number of big taxpayers were hiding the value of their property and not paying the taxes they should have been paying. One might even suspect that one county commissioner who tried to get this audit company kicked out of the county (Jay McRoy) must surely have known something like this was going on, because he represents, we understand, some of these taxpayers as a CPA, or so it is rumored. What we know for a fact is he tried to block the audits.

    We suspect we will have a better idea about what was actually going on when we see the list of the taxpayers' names. Stand by for that.

    But what makes this so egregious is the fact that the county uses its awesome power to force poor people who don't have the money to hire CPA's to hide their taxes to pay relatively small amounts while it has overlooked millions of dollars in property.

    We believe the citizens of this county should rise up in an uproar and demand that the power to foreclose on a person's property be taken away from the county. If it is real property the county will eventually get the taxes or the owners will not be able to sell their property until they pay their taxes. That's enough power.

    It simply is not right for big shot taxpayers to avoid paying tax on millions of dollars of property while a person living on social security lives under the threat of the county confiscating their home.

    Talk about a tale of the Little Guy getting the shaft while the Fat Cats make out like bandits, Beaufort County knows how to do it!