The State Tax Commission voted Monday morning to launch an investigation into whether Detroit is overtaxing property owners through inflated assessments, Christine MacDonald reports in The Detroit News.
The unanimous vote of the three-member panel came with little discussion, except to outline the review's path. An outside firm will be hired to do a random survey of about 500 city properties to determine if the city's numbers are accurate.
The move was prompted by a February series in The Detroit News that exposed widespread over-assessments, rampant tax delinquencies and dysfunction in the city's Assessment Division.
The series cited a recent study showing that many houses are assessed at more than 10 times their selling price, and found that city officials discarded 94 percent of the sales in the city last year before valuing Detroit's residential properties as a part of the city's sales studies.
