The Cook County assessor’s move was prompted by a Sun-Times investigation that found the owner of a Winnetka mansion is getting the biggest tax savings on the “senior freeze” — over $67,000 this year — and that Kaegi is still wrongly granting breaks to businesses and to individuals who claimed it on more than one property.
Perched on a bluff along Lake Michigan’s shoreline in Winnetka is a brick-and-stone mansion that has six bedrooms, six bathrooms and a swimming pool. It’s owned by Jill Fitzgerald, an 84-year-old widow whose family made a fortune distributing produce to Chicago restaurants.
The mansion is worth $7.1 million, according to Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi. Yet Fitzgerald has gotten massive tax breaks under Illinois’ low-income senior citizens assessment freeze, a program that allows people 65 and older with a household income of no more than $65,000 to get tax relief on their primary residence.
Thanks to the government program, Fitzgerald has seen her property tax bills slashed by more than $467,000 over the past dozen years, according to Cook County records. Her tax break this year alone was more than $67,000.
Created 30 years ago to prevent senior citizens from being priced out of their homes by soaring property taxes, particularly in gentrifying neighborhoods, the law allows county assessors to freeze the property assessments for qualified seniors every year, even as their property values soar.
While Kaegi’s current valuation of the mansion is $7.1 million, Fitzgerald has to pay taxes only on the value that the house was assessed at in 2015 — $1.2 million.
To get the tax break, all that Fitzgerald has to do every year is to say she’s qualified — older than 65 and with an eligible household income. Like anyone else applying for the tax break, she wasn’t required to provide any documentation to confirm her household income didn’t exceed $65,000.
And the assessor’s office doesn’t do anything to verify the income listed on those applications — unless someone questions them.
Now, based on a Chicago Sun-Times investigation, Kaegi’s office has reviewed Fitzgerald’s application and others and is demanding proof from 10 property owners who’ve gotten the senior freeze that they qualify.
His staff reviewed Fitzgerald’s senior freeze eligibility in response to questions from the Sun-Times based on voter rolls and other public records indicating family members appear to be living in the mansion with incomes that could make her ineligible for the lucrative tax break.
Prompted by those questions, Kaegi found that Fitzgerald — who saved more on property taxes than any other Cook County homeowner with a senior freeze this year — had sold two apartment buildings for more than $2.5 million six years ago while she was getting the tax breaks on her home.
Kaegi has sent Fitzgerald a letter demanding that she prove she qualified for the tax breaks or face the prospect of having to repay the money she saved, plus penalties and interest.
Fitzgerald isn’t the only homeowner facing questions over the tax break. After the Sun-Times asked Kaegi to explain the senior assessment freezes he approved for 20 properties, 15 of those are now under review.
The Sun-Times examined 98,892 properties that were granted a senior assessment freeze this year — which saved those property owners $263 million in property taxes, shifting that tax burden to other residential and commercial landowners in Cook County.
Senior tax break — at 54
Kaegi’s office also is now questioning a tax break it granted to Armando Saleh, a City Hall lobbyist who formerly was chief of staff to a Cook County commissioner. Saleh has been getting the senior assessment freeze on two Chicago apartment buildings — even though the break is available only for a senior’s primary residence.
And at 54, he’s 11 years too young to qualify.
For several years, Kaegi has gotten separate applications attesting that each Saleh property has a household income no greater than $65,000. Yet Kaegi approved the tax breaks. That has saved Saleh and his wife at least $49,684 over the past decade.
A previous Sun-Times investigation into Kaegi’s handling of senior assessment freeze applications, in 2021, showed the program was riddled with errors. It resulted in five homeowners repaying their wrongful tax savings, plus penalties and interest.
Now the Sun-Times has found that Kaegi’s office has failed to correct many of the problems uncovered three years ago.
Among them: His staff has continued to grant senior assessment freezes to properties owned by businesses even though the tax break is legally available only to individuals.
Kaegi also has given freezes to people who claimed the tax break on more than one property and has approved the breaks without verifying applicants’ income or age — even though applications must include a driver’s license or other government identification.
Asked about the senior assessment freezes for 20 properties, Kaegi spokesman Christian Belanger says those given to Fitzgerald and Saleh are among 15 now under review.
“Our Erroneous Exemptions department made an initial determination that the exemptions were incorrectly claimed and sent a notice to the taxpayer informing them that, unless they want to dispute their case, they must pay back the savings accrued through the exemption,” Belanger says. “This notice isn’t a final determination — the taxpayer still has the opportunity to submit evidence that the exemption was not erroneously claimed, or to request a hearing on the matter.”
Among the homeowners who had to pay up as a result of the Sun-Times investigation three years ago were Martin and Barbara Israel. The tax bill for their 3,300-square-foot condo on the 58th floor of Water Tower Place with stunning views of Lake Michigan had been just $2,500. At the time, they were trying to sell the unit — for $3.3 million.
Kaegi ordered the couple to repay $119,806 in taxes, penalties and interest. This year, the couple’s tax bill totaled $38,238 — 15 times more than they were paying before the Sun-Times began asking questions.
That’s one of the largest “erroneous exemption” cases for Kaegi’s office since January 2019, shortly after he was elected assessor. His staff has found 9,955 homeowners whose taxes were reduced by tax breaks to which they weren’t entitled — everything from the basic homeowner’s exemption to the disabled veterans exemption. Those homeowners were asked to pay a total of $69.3 million in taxes, penalties and interest. Some have repaid the money, records show. Others haven’t.
Those cases included 671 homeowners who lost their senior assessment freeze and had to repay a total of $3.1 million.
Five of them were asked to repay a total of $776,074 in the wake of the 2021 Sun-Times investigation — including the estate of a dead mobster whose family kept getting the senior freeze exemption six years after his death by submitting annual applications in his name. Kaegi has filed a lien on the Bridgeview home, aiming to collect $16,271 when someone buys the home, which is in foreclosure.
‘Difficult to monitor’
Scott Smith, Kaegi’s chief of staff, says “many” other property owners investigated by the Sun-Times were later cleared of any wrongdoing by the assessor’s office and that the agency is doing a good job.
“It is difficult to monitor the exemption process,” Smith says. “We do a pretty good job of catching folks. We’re finding about seven erroneous exemptions a day” among the more than 1 million residential property owners.
Smith says Cook County government’s mainframe computer has made it difficult for the assessor’s staff to ferret out homeowners who are getting exemptions to which they aren’t entitled. He says the county’s property records will be moved to a new computer system sometime in the next few months and that it should make it easier, for instance, to query the database to find people who are getting exemptions on more than one property.
Kaegi will still have to rely upon the Illinois Department of Revenue to confirm an applicant’s household income.
Illinois lawmakers passed the senior assessment freeze in 1994, hoping it would keep seniors from being forced to sell their homes to escape skyrocketing taxes. But then-Gov. Jim Edgar vetoed it.
“I had to be the fiscal disciplinarian,” Edgar said three years ago. “Any time you have changes to the tax code, you don’t know how it’s going to turn out, and people are going to game the system.”
The Illinois General Assembly overrode Edgar’s veto, and the senior assessment freeze has become a headache for Kaegi and other assessors. They say it’s difficult to verify a person’s income and to make sure that homeowners aren’t getting tax breaks on more than one property elsewhere in the county, state or country.
Of the more than 308,000 Illinois homeowners who got the senior freeze in 2022, nearly 32% live in Cook County, according to the most recent data from the state revenue department.
Source and full article: https://chicago.suntimes.com/the-watchdogs/2024/11/15/senior-freeze-property-tax-fritz-kaegi-cook-county-assessor