This story is a collaboration between the Illinois Answers Project and the Chicago Tribune.
Property tax bills arrived months late for hundreds of thousands of Cook County homeowners last year, causing headaches and confusion for property owners and the local governments they fund.
Five months later, thousands are still waiting for bills and tens of thousands are waiting for refunds, the latest development in the technology upgrade debacle that has roiled the county’s tax system for more than four years with no clear end in sight.
“I don’t know what happened — I just never got the bill,” said Melvin Brooks, a 72-year-old retired pastor.
Brooks said he called the Cook County treasurer’s office to ask why he never learned what he owes on his home in west suburban Bellwood.
He worries he’ll get a double bill all at once, a whopping unplanned cost for the home where his children and grandchildren now live, he said.
“I tried online, but I can’t get through,” Brooks said. “There’s some kind of glitch or something.”
The “glitch” is actually dozens of issues that have bedeviled county officials and the technology contractor, Tyler Technologies. As of last week, nearly 2,900 second installment bills that were supposed to go out last November were still unsent — including the bungalow Brooks has owned since 1982. Another 8,560 first installment bills from this spring were also in limbo until Friday, when 3,897 were mailed.
That could mean a subset of taxpayers get three property tax bills in rapid succession this year: ones that should have been due last December, this April, and the next round slated for the late summer or early fall.
At the same time, officials say they’re working through a backlog of roughly 91,000 tax refunds totaling some $200 million in overpayments that still need to be returned.
It’s the latest black eye for the county in the property tax mess that has set off a yearslong circular blame game among elected officials over who should be held accountable. Tyler’s multimillion-dollar upgrade of the county’s property tax systems has hit countless roadblocks and blown multiple deadlines since it kicked off more than a decade ago.
When complete, it promises to streamline operations across the county’s property tax offices by converting 20 years of data from disparate systems and finally retire the county’s aging mainframe computers.
In addition to the other problems, taxing districts like schools and libraries have struggled to understand how much property tax revenue they can count on.
“We’re doing the best we can with a bad vendor,” said Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas, Tyler’s chief critic, adding that the company’s lack of urgency to fix ongoing issues amounts to “technical incompetence and insanity.”
Extra requirements and functionality requests are a given with a project as large as Cook County’s conversion, a Tyler Technologies spokesperson said in an email, adding the company always responded quickly with fixes.
Pappas is barred from engaging with Tyler officials working on the project after its CEO said she subjected workers to months of verbal abuse and threats to officials’ reputations. Pappas didn’t dispute using harsh language and said she was trying to hold the company to task on taxpayers’ behalf. Tyler said her ongoing criticism has detracted from finding solutions when new problems emerge.
In November, 8,560 bills were excluded when the county mailed out second installment bills for all of the county’s more than 1.8 million parcels. It wasn’t until March that a first batch of those, about 4,200 bills, went out. Another 1,000 or so were mailed at the start of April, and just under 500 more were sent April 17, per the treasurer’s office.
Officials could not estimate the total amount of taxes due in the unsent bills. But the more than 2,800 properties that had not received bills as of last week totaled nearly $1.14 billion in taxable market value, according to the latest figures from the Cook County assessor’s office.
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle downplayed the issue, noting at a mid-April media availability that the bills represent a “relatively small fraction” of the county’s tax base. The unresolved ones will “be out as soon as we can get them out.”
No taxpayers will be assessed late fees or penalties if they pay their bill within 30 days of receiving it, Pappas said.
“All remaining PINS are being processed in collaboration with the treasurer’s office,” Tyler’s spokesperson said in an email, referring to the property index numbers associated with each parcel and property tax bill.
Records requested by Illinois Answers Project and the Tribune noted thousands of properties across the county with unsent bills — each accompanied with an associated “reason” for the issue.
“PAY Message AMT <> MIS” was listed as the reason for more than a thousand unsent bills. That refers to a mismatch between the county’s old mainframe and the portion of the bill that lists what the property owner paid for its first installment, a treasurer’s office official said. Either the number was incorrect, or that payment wasn’t factored into the due balance for the second installment.
If a full year’s charge was $2,500, for example, and a homeowner paid $1,000 for the first installment, the bill under the new system might have incorrectly recorded the payment as $980. So the owner was — on paper — on the hook for $1,520 instead of the accurate remaining amount of $1,500.
About another 800 defective bills were blamed on “1597 Missed Payments from Logan email on 11/3,” referring to a database administrator in the treasurer’s office. That defect involves payments that were not properly factored into final calculations during a system blackout that occurred while switching to the new Tyler platform, officials said. Nearly 300 bills simply listed the reason for the mistake as “unknown.”
“Those notations amount to identifying possible explanations for a defect and a possible pathway to resolution,” treasurer’s office spokesman Michael Puccinelli said in an email. “We say ‘possible’ because in a proprietary system it’s impossible for CCTO employees to know exactly which proposed solutions will work to eliminate defects in Tyler’s system.”
The list of outstanding bills provided on April 14 held Tyler responsible for about 2,700 of them, with the treasurer’s office on the hook for about 600.
Affected properties appear scattered across the county and by type of parcel. They included more than 2,600 residential buildings, 67 apartment buildings and 380 commercial properties. Just over half were located in Chicago, with the rest spread across 121 suburbs.
Sheila Sales, 82, has been calling the treasurer’s office every few weeks since last fall to ask when she’ll receive her bill.
“I spend an hour on the phone, and then they just tell me there’s something wrong with the computer and they don’t know what’s going on,” said Sales, who said she never encountered a similar issue in the 40-plus years she’s owned her home in Chicago’s Washington Heights neighborhood.
“I need my bill,” Sales said. “I don’t want them to give me a big 2- or 3-year bill where I can’t hardly pay for it.”
South and West Side homeowners are already reeling from sharply higher property charges when last year’s round of bills came out.
Brooks is similarly worried for the security of his kids and grandkids in his Bellwood home. The area has been experiencing gentrification pressures, he said.
“If anything were to happen, it would fall on me,” Brooks said. “I would be concerned about it for anybody who this shoe is fitting … if you can’t pay it, your house will go on the auction block.”
Taxing bodies out of the loop on revenues
Meanwhile, smaller taxing bodies stung by late property tax distributions after fall bills were paid are still in the dark about how much money they should expect, when it might drop and how to account for it.
Su Reynders, executive director of the Mount Prospect Public Library, told her board earlier this month that the library received $4.6 million from the 2024 tax year. Unfortunately, it landed during the library’s 2026 fiscal year and was still about $670,000 short of what they expected.
Trust in the county is low after months of complaints about communications and explanations for delays. Some districts were overpaid or underpaid last year, a problem that wasn’t apparent to county officials until the Tribune asked about it.
The irregular flow of cash will distort their financial reports and could deepen mistrust that the county has adequate guardrails to properly account for where taxpayers’ money is ending up.
Reynders and Amy Franco from the Hillside Public Library have been surveying other libraries in recent months and learned several are still waiting for 2024 tax year distributions. The 16 districts Franco recently surveyed estimate they are still missing a combined $4.2 million from the 2024 tax year.
While districts receive emails when new money is deposited, it’s difficult for those leaders to confirm how much they are still owed because the county’s extranet for all of its taxing agencies is not working, either. The extranet helps leaders track how much property tax revenue has been collected, which tax year the money comes from and which sub-funds — for things like building maintenance, workers’ compensation, paying back bonds, pensions or insurance — those payments belong to.
A treasurer’s office official said earlier this month their priority was getting money out the door before making the extranet fully functional and that they “continue to work through defects with that distribution data.”
Tyler’s spokesperson said the sub-fund breakout was a recent request and was a new requirement, “not an issue with the software. We responded quickly to this request and have provided the information to them for validation.”
One of the problems, the treasurer’s office said, is that Tyler cannot say how much money should be distributed to each sub-fund. Without full accounting, required financial statements, annual audits, budget tracking and forecasting are thrown off and libraries risk spending money that’s supposed to be dedicated to pensions on building maintenance, Franco said.
For Reynders, that outstanding $670,000 is key to making the math work on an ongoing renovation that will drain the library’s capital reserves. She said it’s been nearly 21 years since her library was renovated. “I’ve been careful and fiscally responsible planning for this, but if the money doesn’t come, then what?”
“My No. 1 question right now is, where is the remainder of the tax year ’24 payments? Is it sitting in an account and they’re trying to figure out how to distribute it? Or is that money gone and they don’t know how to rectify? Does the money exist?” Reynders said. “I will not let this go. I am absolutely committed to seeing that $670,000 accounted for.”
“There’s constant audits in here,” Pappas said. “There’s no skimming in here.”
Preckwinkle has also pledged that this year’s regularly scheduled audit of county finances will include a focus on information technology.
‘Back and forth’ on refunds
Meanwhile, tens of thousands are waiting for the slow trickle of refunds to make their way into the mail.
The treasurer’s office has not been able to issue bulk refunds for close to a year “due to the large number of underlying data issues that require them to check each refund individually before issuing,” according to the county’s property tax tracker.
“You get a batch of 300 refunds, and 60% of them are wrong, so they have to go back,” Pappas said in an interview Thursday. “So it goes back and forth and back and forth.”
Duplicate and overpayment refunds need to be split into the original tax, the penalty calculation, and interest. Some of those refunds are attributed to the wrong tax year, too.
The problem stems from “data details that were not provided to us” before the system blackout, Tyler’s spokesperson said. The data is now in Pappas’ hands for testing and validation, they said.
Glenn Guttman, a property tax attorney whose business runs on receiving a percentage of successful property tax appeal refunds, said industry colleagues considered taking the treasurer to court but ultimately decided against it. No matter what a judge ruled, the treasurer’s office simply can’t cut the check.
“We can’t chase anything down. Everything is done from our end, a lot of people are waiting for these refund checks. There’s nothing we can do to implore the treasurer to write a check.”
While he understands there are few whose hearts would bleed for appeals attorneys, he notes behind every stalled refund is a person or a business who likely needs that money to get by.
Various county offices “always say one or two months,” Guttman said. “April was the first time we had — in one year — any refund come through from the treasurer’s office.”
