TennisDaze
If you thought I was trying to make excuses for the tax department I must have written that post very badly.
There is no doubt a lot of the current mess involves exactly what you are saying…the same wells, with the same ID’s, being billed twice, and the County claiming that isn’t the case…but there are also situations where duplicate bills were sent covering the same wells but using different ID’s because the operator of those wells changed between last July, when the first late billings went out, and the point this latest bunch of bills were mailed out.
That difference on those accounts in no way justifies any of this double billing being done, or those previous payments not being credited to the new property ID’s for those wells. It’s just added another layer of confusion on those particular accounts.
On the payment due date on the duplicate bills, in no way was I trying to say the tax people give that much time so they could correct their errors. What the person I talked to at the Appraisal District (not the tax office) had said was…the tax office now understands the problem (not when all these bills and letters were sent out), and the due dates being that far in the future at least gives some time for the tax office to get those bills straightened out.
But like I said earlier, that additional time isn’t going to help the folks who unknowingly pay these bogus duplicate bills and are then forced to try to get a refund out of that same messed up system.