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posted by martyb on Sunday December 08 2019, @01:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the validate-your-inputs dept.

A data entry error in the Utah State Tax Commission office for Wasatch County caused the value of a home to be over-valued by close to ~$1 Billion dollars.

In May, an error was made which recorded a house built in 1978 as having a value of more than $987 million in the 2019 tax rolls.

In reality, the home should only have had a 2019 taxable value of $302,000.

Wasatch County Assessor Maureen 'Buff' Griffiths told officials last month a staff member may have dropped a phone on a keyboard. Griffiths said the 'horrific' and 'bizarre' mistake has resulted in a countywide overvaluation of more than $6 million

Wasatch county is sparsely populated with a population of 23,530 in its 1,206 square mile area (averaging 19 individuals per square mile). This single mistake flowed through the system causing the county office to significantly overestimate revenue and increase budgets upward, with the consequence that

the blunder has since produced revenue shortfalls in five taxing entities, with budgets already approved.

In Wasatch County's budget, the shortfall is more than $1 million. The Wasatch County Fire District will be short about $253,000, the Wasatch County Parks District will be short about $138,000, and Central Utah Water will be short about $217,000, according to a tax correction notice circulated by the county.

But the biggest blow is to Wasatch County School District, which is short about $4.4 million.

Perhaps unsurprisingly,

Taxpayers may now have to pay for the shortfall, with tax increases over the next three years

County Manager Mike Davis indicates that existing checks should have caught the error, but that in the future they would 'do a better job.'


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by driverless on Sunday December 08 2019, @02:14PM (17 children)

    by driverless (4770) on Sunday December 08 2019, @02:14PM (#929707)

    This is an interesting case of an obviously-wrong value where it's not obvious how you'd catch it in advance. While it's easy enough to say post facto that there should have been a range check exactly here to catch exactly this problem, when you've got dozens or perhaps even hundreds of interrelated values that need to be checked, of which all of them can be well within range but intermediate and/or final results could be out of range, it's not clear how you'd catch something like this.

    A related issue is that no-one would ever expect a house to be valued at $1B, which is another reason why such outrageous values could slip through.

    (This is to anticipate the inevitable response of "those idiots should have done range checking").

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by legont on Sunday December 08 2019, @02:39PM

      by legont (4179) on Sunday December 08 2019, @02:39PM (#929711)

      no-one would ever expect a house to be valued at $1B

      In Wasatch county? Man, they are Mormons, remember?
      Also, there is a little place called Park City over there where nothing is impossible.

      --
      "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
    • (Score: 1) by RandomFactor on Sunday December 08 2019, @02:49PM

      by RandomFactor (3682) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 08 2019, @02:49PM (#929712) Journal

      Adding a bunch of checks is pretty easy and basic. But apparently they had the checks in place to catch this, they just ignored them or something :-\

      --
      В «Правде» нет известий, в «Известиях» нет правды
    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 08 2019, @03:39PM (2 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday December 08 2019, @03:39PM (#929726)

      it's not obvious how you'd catch it in advance

      How about differential analysis? You're working on the tax rolls, you finish a batch of input - run a total revenue tally on the spreadsheet or whatever this county uses and check for the delta resulting from your changes (you KNOW they do this every time they adjust anybody to make sure they're not falling short.) In addition to checking for shortfalls, also check for unexpected windfalls of, oh, say, $100,000 or more revenue increase, just to be sure.

      Somebody accidentally-on-purpose dropped a phone on that keyboard to get a popular tax cut passed, temporarily. Check the recent local elections - the winners are your top suspects.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 2) by dry on Monday December 09 2019, @02:08AM (1 child)

        by dry (223) on Monday December 09 2019, @02:08AM (#929890) Journal

        Somebody accidentally-on-purpose dropped a phone on that keyboard to get a popular tax cut passed, temporarily. Check the recent local elections - the winners are your top suspects.

        I actually read the article, no mention of a tax cut, just spending increases based on projected revenue. Now it is possible, if there were recent elections (don't Americans elect everyone on the same day, usually bu marking D or R?) someone put forth a capital project or increased school spending but it looks more like a simple mistake.
        Anyways, it's Utah, aren't they Christians who will vote for the moral character, namely the one under R?

        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday December 09 2019, @11:42AM

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday December 09 2019, @11:42AM (#930009)

          Well - if it's a spending project instead of a tax cut and election, that makes it even easier to track: who benefited from the spending project? It wouldn't have been approved if there weren't money for it - hey Shirley, time to "drop the phone" again...

          Now that the contracts are signed and the work is in progress, oops - guess we'll just have to cut spending "where we can" like out of our childrens' education, teachers' salaries, etc.

          --
          🌻🌻 [google.com]
    • (Score: 3, Touché) by Bot on Sunday December 08 2019, @04:13PM (1 child)

      by Bot (3902) on Sunday December 08 2019, @04:13PM (#929736) Journal

      db: client
      client: wat
      db: this entry is 1B
      client: so wat
      db: doesn't seem normal to me
      client: what is that entry about?
      db: the field is called estimated_value
      client: and do you do any processing over it?
      db: it is linked to the field taxable_amount
      client: directly or inversely, mathematically speaking?
      db: directly, entry goes up, linked field goes up
      client: uh leave it as is, we don't want to touch the taxable amount, the human does not like it
      db: so what?
      client: human is nervous, already bashed the keyboard today with a heavy object, we don't want the hd fizzling up do we?
      db: OMG no no

      and they all lived happily ever after

      --
      Account abandoned.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @08:35PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @08:35PM (#929813)

        db: and they told me it's NUMBER(20) so it should be okay

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @04:18PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @04:18PM (#929738)

      Nevertheless, those idiots should have done range checking.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by wisnoskij on Sunday December 08 2019, @05:20PM (4 children)

      by wisnoskij (5149) <reversethis-{moc ... ksonsiwnohtanoj}> on Sunday December 08 2019, @05:20PM (#929760)

      You do not have to catch the error, any reasonable home owner will inform you of the error when they get a tax bill a hundred times the value of their house.
      Similarly, any reasonable accountant will notice that the expected tax revenue of a small county has increased 2 fold in a single year and look into the cause before spending said taxes.

      It really sounds like their needs to be an investigate and some jail time. How did every department in the county manage to spend twice their annual budget with no increase is costs or changes in their area?

      • (Score: 2) by dry on Monday December 09 2019, @02:12AM (3 children)

        by dry (223) on Monday December 09 2019, @02:12AM (#929891) Journal

        The article did say,

        Griffiths said the countywide windfall went unnoticed because it was 'chalked up to the booming county'

        As well as the property owner not being aware of their tax bill yet.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by ledow on Sunday December 08 2019, @11:52PM

      by ledow (5567) on Sunday December 08 2019, @11:52PM (#929860) Homepage

      There should have been a huge number of warnings further down the line.

      If your budget suddenly jumps by a million, and your budgets for every department allocated from that jump by a huge, significant amount, then someone along the way should have noticed if they were doing their job.

      Human error makes this things quite common. What catches them is people with brains asking questions. Why has this gone up by $4.4m more than expected? People ask these questions. You might think they'll go "Sshh, don't ask, just take the money!" but as shown here anyone who works with money knows what's going to happen - it's going to come back on them, harder than if the mistake hadn't existed at all. Auditors take no prisoners and they would not want the mistake coming back on them, especially if it means recouping the shortfall by taking less budget next year.

      There should/would have been a number of people querying that number, that may even have been how the error was found - suddenly lots of involved people say "Are you sure?" and you go and check why the number has changed so significantly.

      The error is understandable. The *change* not being flagged by every department along the way - from the initial valuation, to the total income, to the individual budgets - is the problem. Everyone would have suddenly realised an X% increase in their figures almost immediately as soon as they got their new figures.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by toddestan on Monday December 09 2019, @02:43AM (2 children)

      by toddestan (4982) on Monday December 09 2019, @02:43AM (#929904)

      Another way is to have a report that grabs all the properties in the county, and lists things like list the 10 most valuable properties, the 10 least valuable properties, the 10 properties with the largest increase, the 10 properties with the largest decrease, the 10 largest properties, the 10 smallest properties, etc. Then just look at the list and make sure that everything on it makes sense, or at least is plausible. That won't catch everything, but it things like this will stick out as obvious outliers.

      • (Score: 2) by edIII on Monday December 09 2019, @03:54AM

        by edIII (791) on Monday December 09 2019, @03:54AM (#929928)

        Range checking is one thing, but another one is mitigation techniques for data corruption. I've been involved in data acquisition projects involving OCR and physical entry, and perfect performance is an impossibility. So you have to plan ahead to catch the data errors.

        That's translates to regular data acquisition jobs too. You have to assume that at least 1 out every 2000 data entries have some sort of typo. That's real life experience telling me that over millions of records being entered by employees. We had somebody employed full time just to fix recurring problems like this.

        One of the ways we tried to detect anomalies where statistical and frequency analysis. This would've shown up on a report using standard of deviation. Against all properties, that ~$900 million would've shown up very brightly on a report. If you segmented that by relative location, it would've been a ~$900 million property surrounded by ~$300k properties. That would look like a magical tower extending to Heaven surrounded by apartment complexes, duplexes, and 7-11's. If you explained that these things should look more like Kansas than the Rocky Mountains, then even some C-Suites and managers should be able to interpret that.

        At this point if you don't assume a percentage level of fuckups in data entry and prepare for them, you will just suffer from them. Truth is everyone is just rolling the dice everyday, and this time, Utah crapped the fuck out :)

        --
        Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
      • (Score: 1) by Jay on Monday December 09 2019, @08:09PM

        by Jay (8679) on Monday December 09 2019, @08:09PM (#930206)

        Yep. Checking for outliers is the simple solution. In my work I often throw together a quick query to do that on annual numbers for things. Show me the change between one year and the next, show me the top 10 items which changed the most, positive and negative. It's a quick sanity check that's saved my butt many times. Something is 0 which shouldn't be? Something is 2x as large as it should be? Those two canceled each other out and made the top level number look reasonable?

        Counts, frequency distributions, means and modes all are quick sanity checks as well. FFS, a quick mean comparison of property values between this year and last year would have caught this. Nobody is even doing that? 23,500 people, lets say 4 people per house is about 5900 properties. Spread a billion between them and means the average house value went up about $170,000 from one year to the next. That's unreasonable in 99.9% of the country.

        What this fuckup tells me is that nobody who really handles data for a living is doing any of the work. Small town pencil pushers and button clickers at their best.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Sunday December 08 2019, @02:14PM (1 child)

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Sunday December 08 2019, @02:14PM (#929708) Journal

    I have really gotten to hate that "oh well, there's next time" blowing off of problems. Been used in voting suppression. Problems with a voter's registry or identification? "Oh well, just vote next time." They need to fix this budget problem now, not next year.

    Didn't anyone notice that there seemed a suspiciously large increase in revenue from the year preceding the PEBKAC error? Smells strongly like motivated failure to notice. And now, shrug, welp, guess the taxpayers are just gonna have to cough up more to fix the error, hyuck, hyuck. Let's hear them say that one again, after they've all been voted out of office.

    • (Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday December 08 2019, @10:42PM

      by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Sunday December 08 2019, @10:42PM (#929843)

      Didn't anyone notice that there seemed a suspiciously large increase in revenue from the year preceding the PEBKAC error? Smells strongly like motivated failure to notice.

      Bingo. You can bet someone noticed, and I suspect that a thorough investigation would reveal some shady profiting from the mistake.

  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @03:05PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @03:05PM (#929716)

    The Wasatch Weekly Dispatch is reporting that the 62 year-old clerk who made the error was: "Extremely tired, as the bed schedule for his wives (aged 12-23), 'wore him right out'. The Wasatch County Executive comment was unintelligible, as he was getting blown by his 14 year-old sixth wife when asked about the situation by this publication."

  • (Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Sunday December 08 2019, @03:18PM (1 child)

    by SomeGuy (5632) on Sunday December 08 2019, @03:18PM (#929720)

    Over the last few years in many places, prices including assessed housing prices and their associated property tax have gone through the roof. The cost today can easily be two or three times what it was a few years back. It's quite common for a tax assessed value to be much higher than reality, but unless it is grossly over valued, as in this case, there is little a normal person can do.

    Because of all of this, it is no surprise that this error went uncaught and very well may have been an intensional "error". You know damn well next year the budgets will not shrink. They never do.

    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 08 2019, @04:09PM

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday December 08 2019, @04:09PM (#929734)

      The cost today can easily be two or three times what it was a few years back

      Two or three, sure. Two or three THOUSAND? There's bounds checking logic for that.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Sunday December 08 2019, @03:27PM (6 children)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane (4757) on Sunday December 08 2019, @03:27PM (#929721)

    and my taxes went up, I'd sue the county council. Because why the fuck should I pay for some careless council worker dropping their phone on their fucking keyboard?

    • (Score: 5, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Sunday December 08 2019, @03:43PM (4 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Sunday December 08 2019, @03:43PM (#929728)

      why the fuck should I pay for some careless council worker dropping their phone on their fucking keyboard?

      Because, in a county that small, the (singular) judge is related to, in business, or bed, or all three with the responsible party and you've got a snowball's chance in hell of ever getting an appeal out to an impartial venue.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @05:39PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @05:39PM (#929766)

        On the other hand, in a county that small you don't need a lot of rope to effect significant change, as you don't need to hang that many people.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @10:22PM (1 child)

          by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @10:22PM (#929837)

          One gotta ask, is rope covered by your second amendment?
          And when one gotta, one gotta. So there you have it.

          • (Score: 2) by dry on Monday December 09 2019, @02:21AM

            by dry (223) on Monday December 09 2019, @02:21AM (#929894) Journal

            One gotta ask, is rope covered by your second amendment?

            Utah uses, or at least recently used, the firing squad for executions. They're very religious there.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @06:31PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @06:31PM (#930154)

        why the fuck should I pay for some careless council worker dropping their phone on their fucking keyboard?

        Because, in a county that small, the (singular) judge is related to, in business, or bed, or all three with the responsible party and you've got a snowball's chance in hell of ever getting an appeal out to an impartial venue.

        1) The services are consumed by the public. If people disagree with the taxes-services provided, it's a political issue, not a legal one. Simply change the government budget (possibly by ways of elections/recall vote, or whatever).
        2) The assumption of the courts is that the government is trying to serve the public interest. I know the common libertarian mantra is "government is the problem," but do you actually know any government workers? 99% of them are trying to serve the public interest. If courts could start having unilateral ability to dictate government policy, there is a term for that... "dictator." Americans tend to look down on that.
        3) Even if this was rampant corruption, it'd be a criminal action against the corrupt officials, not a civil action against the city.
        4) There was no contract between the city and the citizens that their tax bill would be "x." There was a contract between the city and its workers and contractors that they'd be paid "x" now. If the city fails to pay them, then there WOULD be cause for a lawsuit from those individuals against the city.
        5) Let's say that a suit went forward, and the citizens won against the city. Then what? The city needs to... what... pay back the citizens money? How do they get that money, by taxing the people and then reimbursing that tax? Theoretically, what would the law suit achieve even if it went perfectly?

        The reason why such a lawsuit doesn't have a snowball's chance in Hell is not due to old-boys-club corruption (although I won't dismiss that idea exists as well, *cough* traffic court *cough*); it's because it makes no sense.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @04:20PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @04:20PM (#929739)

      Because the money needs spent to provide service to you, so they will assess a supplementary tax on you to clear their shortfall.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @03:30PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 08 2019, @03:30PM (#929722)

    Spend more!!

    While the response to shortage is to demand even more from the taxpayer.

    Yeah, that's sustainable.

    • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 08 2019, @05:28PM

      by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 08 2019, @05:28PM (#929763) Journal
      Yes, it does seem quite the juicy morality tale.
  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday December 08 2019, @05:28PM (7 children)

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 08 2019, @05:28PM (#929762) Journal
    The article cites $6 million in excess spending, broken down between several budgets. Glancing around, I see Wasatch County's 2018 budget [utah.gov] was $21 million, and the above error meant $1 million in the county budget. So they're about 5% high there. If the other budgets are proportionally affected, then that's significant, but not disastrous.

    Still it demonstrates the spendthrift nature of government and maybe people in general. What would you do with a surprise 5% raise? Spend it all in five months?
    • (Score: 2) by number11 on Sunday December 08 2019, @06:41PM (4 children)

      by number11 (1170) Subscriber Badge on Sunday December 08 2019, @06:41PM (#929781)

      Still it demonstrates the spendthrift nature of government and maybe people in general. What would you do with a surprise 5% raise? Spend it all in five months?

      When there's a constant din of "when you gonna fix the potholes?" and "we need more police" and "my kid needs to be in a class that doesn't have 40 other kids in it" and "our glorious HS football team needs a stadium" and "Amazon will build a warehouse here, but needs the county to pay for it"? Normal human reaction to a surprise 5% raise is to say "Thank $deity, those unreasonable bastards taxpaying citizens will shut up now!"

      • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 09 2019, @12:17AM (3 children)

        by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 09 2019, @12:17AM (#929867) Journal

        When there's a constant din

        There's also a constant din of "We want less taxes" too. Funny how only one side gets heard.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by number11 on Monday December 09 2019, @01:22AM (2 children)

          by number11 (1170) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 09 2019, @01:22AM (#929882)

          There's also a constant din of "We want less taxes" too. Funny how only one side gets heard.

          Maybe you hadn't heard about the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. According to Marketwatch [marketwatch.com]

          The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act made small cuts in rates to most individual taxpayers, while cutting the corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%, expanding deductions for “pass-through” companies, and taxing only corporate income earned in the U.S., not worldwide.

          So the important side got heard.

          • (Score: 1) by khallow on Monday December 09 2019, @06:19AM (1 child)

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 09 2019, @06:19AM (#929972) Journal
            Sounds like Wasatch County does some exciting stuff!

            I see US Congress didn't actually cut spending in the process.
            • (Score: 2) by number11 on Tuesday December 10 2019, @06:15AM

              by number11 (1170) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 10 2019, @06:15AM (#930476)

              Nope. They increased the military budget.

    • (Score: 2) by shortscreen on Sunday December 08 2019, @07:25PM

      by shortscreen (2252) on Sunday December 08 2019, @07:25PM (#929787) Journal

      I find this story hilarious for exactly that reason. A typo caused an apparent spike in revenue and everybody was too busy going on a preemptive shopping spree to wonder why this extra money was even coming in.

    • (Score: 2) by dry on Monday December 09 2019, @02:25AM

      by dry (223) on Monday December 09 2019, @02:25AM (#929896) Journal

      What would you do with a surprise 5% raise? Spend it all in five months?

      Yes, I have a few things that need money such as some dental work. They may have potholes to fill.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Sunday December 08 2019, @07:49PM (1 child)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Sunday December 08 2019, @07:49PM (#929792) Homepage Journal

    1. Data validation is your friend. Some random rural county is unlike to have any homes valued at more than a few million.

    2. Government loves spending money. There is no reason to increase budgets, just because you see you have extra income coming in. This must have been the first year they thought they had the extra money, so that means that they immediately went on a spending spree. Stupid.

    Ok, three obvious points:

    3. If some rural county suddenly has an increase of $6 million in their property tax budget, this ought to get someone's attention. The county controller was asleep at the wheel.

    I'm honestly not seeing why the taxpayers should suffer a tax increase. Time to tighten the belt enough to make up for the overspending. Oh, and fire a couple of county administrators.

    --
    Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @02:36AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09 2019, @02:36AM (#929901)

      I'm honestly not seeing why the taxpayers should suffer a tax increase.

      Because they voted for the people that both made the error and failed to notice it?

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