Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi has mistakenly handed out more than $930,000 in property tax breaks to homeowners and businesses since he took office nearly seven years ago.
Those “erroneous” property tax exemptions went to 287 property owners, according to the assessor’s office.
Kaegi’s staff says his office goes after those it finds took tax exemptions they didn’t qualify to get, and that it initially sought to collect another $900,000 in penalties and interest from those 287 property owners — money his office would use to help catch people cheating on their real estate taxes.
But Kaegi ultimately decided to waive all of the penalties and interest on all of the “erroneous exemptions” it’s granted, according to data the Chicago Sun-Times obtained from the assessor’s office.
Kaegi decided not to penalize those who wrongly got tax breaks, because the assessor’s office shouldn’t have granted them in the first place.
“We do not bill interest or penalty in the event of an assessor error,” according to Kaegi staffer Michael Beaver.
David Prescott was among those who got a tax break in error. He was puzzled when he received the tax bill on the Wilmette home he and his wife bought in July 2000 from a disabled veteran for $880,000.
Their 2001 property tax bill showed they didn’t owe any money at all.
Prescott did some digging and discovered he and his wife were continuing to get a tax break that disabled veterans can take — which the previous owner had been getting.
Kaegi’s staff apparently didn’t catch that it shouldn’t have kept allowing the tax break after the home was sold.
“We didn’t apply for any of these exemptions,” says Prescott, who alerted the assessor’s office about the error. “I didn’t think it was anything nefarious. I think it was just incompetence.”
Months later, Prescott got a bill for $20,625 in delinquent taxes. The assessor’s records showed the couple also owed penalties and interest totaling $16,500, which Kaegi waived.
“I didn’t have to pay any penalties [or interest] because it was an error on their side,” Prescott says. “I alerted them to the error. It took a year and a half to fix it.”
George Bahramis, a Glenview accountant, had similar property tax problems on six homes that his company, Eon Property Management, bought in Chicago, Calumet City, Dolton, Lansing and Tinley Park.
For several years, the assessor’s office under Kaegi and his predecessor Joseph Berrios kept giving homeowner exemptions on those properties, saving Bahramis more than $50,000 in property taxes on the homes that his company leases.
Homeowner exemptions are allowed only for owner-occupied primary residences.
Kaegi eventually filed liens against each property in an effort to recover a total of $50,172 in erroneous tax breaks, some dating to 2015, when Berrios was the elected assessor.
“The assessor’s office didn’t update anything, and they left the exemptions on them for years,’’ according to Bahramis, who says he never applied for tax breaks on any of those homes.
Eon repaid the money from those tax breaks. But records show Kaegi waived $28,744 in penalties and interest for the erroneous breaks awarded since he was elected in 2018.
Bahramis’s tax issues surfaced while he was under investigation over loans he got from Bridgeport’s Washington Federal Bank for Savings, which federal regulators shut down in late 2017 after the death of its CEO, John Gembara, who officials found had embezzled millions from the bank.
Bahramis and former business partner Edward Gobbo, a city of Chicago truck driver who became a property developer, both filed for bankruptcy more than a decade ago, owing the bank hundreds of thousands of dollars. After the bankruptcy cases ended, Gembara resumed lending money to both men.
Bahramis wouldn’t talk about his loans from the failed bank.
Ald. Walter Burnett, (27th), and his wife were also among those who wrongly were granted property tax exemptions. For eight years, they got homeowner exemptions on both the house where they lived and an investment property. That ended when the Sun-Times exposed the erroneous tax breaks in August 2021.
Burnett repaid the money he had saved from the homeowner exemptions the couple wrongly received on their investment property in the 4800 block of West Crystal Street.
But records show he and his wife didn’t have to pay the $622 in penalties and interest for the erroneous exemption, which had saved the Burnetts $691 in 2020. Kaegi waived those fees. It’s unclear why.
Burnett didn’t return messages.
Kaegi’s biggest blunders involved four Brookdale Senior Living properties in Lake View, Lincoln Park, Des Plaines and Glenview.
All were discovered by Brookdale. It found that its 2021 tax bills were wrongly cut by $530,541 because Kaegi had given them hundreds of homeowner and senior citizen exemptions — far more than the number of people living in those buildings.
In January, Brookdale paid the money it should have.
Kaegi had waived $424,433 in penalties and interest.
“It’s the assessor’s mistake. It’s his problem,” Brookdale’s attorney Harold Hicks says. “In one case, we got 500 credits, when we should have only gotten 260” exemptions.
Kaegi spokesman Christian Belanger acknowledges the mistakes in granting tax breaks and the waiving of penalties and interest that resulted, but says it doesn’t happen often.
“The number of erroneous exemptions with no interest payments is a very small faction of the overall number of erroneous exemptions — less than 1%,” Belanger says. “It is an even smaller fraction of the more than 1 million properties given exemptions every year.”
When the agency finds tax breaks were taken that property owners didn’t qualify for, it typically goes after them, according to Belanger.
“In 2024, the erroneous exemption unit collected $5.4 million in revenue, including $1.2 million in revenue from interest and penalties,” he says.
Contributing: Justin Myers