eAppeals – On-Line Property Assessment Appeals Program

About the Program

Category: Information Technology (Best in Category)

Year: 2014

In 2013, four King County agencies – Department of Assessments, Board of Appeals and Equalization (BOE), Tax Advisor Office, and King County Information Technology – teamed up to create eAppeals, a new web-based service that allows property owners to file an appeal of their official property assessment on-line. Previously, the process was entirely paper-based, time consuming, and cumbersome. Appellants had to complete multiple paper forms, find comparable properties to validate their appeal, and submit the package to the BOE office in downtown Seattle in person or by mail. The new eAppeals system allows appellants to file from the convenience of their home or office using electronic documents. eAppeals also provides property owners with one on-line portal to perform the sales and valuation research necessary to validate an appeal. Using eAppeals, property owners or their representatives can: • Research their own assessed value and assessed value history; • Search for comparable properties to base their appeal upon; • Enter the assessment value they believe to be correct into a property tax calculator wizard to determine generally what that value would mean in terms of a hypothetical property tax reduction; • Get information about the distribution of their property tax revenue and the appeal process; • File and track the status of their appeal . About 30 percent of the accepted appeals filed in the first six months of the eAppeals program were done using the web-based service – that’s over 1,300 appeals filed on-line.