Two months after a Chicago Sun-Times Watchdogs investigation revealed that Mayor Brandon Johnson’s city budget director Annette Guzman had taken illegal property tax breaks for five years, she’s paying back the rest of what she should have paid.
The Sun-Times reported in May that Guzman had taken property tax breaks she wasn’t entitled to for the past five years, saving her $3,432 in taxes on a South Loop condo she leases to tenants.
Annette Guzman got the approval she needed to claim those tax breaks from Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi, her former boss.
After being asked why he’d approved those tax breaks, Kaegi decided Guzman should pay up for only a portion of what she’d failed to pay: $2,071.29, covering only the past three years, out of the five years for which she’d gotten the illegal tax breaks.
Following the Sun-Times report, records show, Guzman made good on the rest of the property taxes that she should have been paying, the remaining two years. She sent Kaegi two checks on April 3 to cover the additional $1,360.80 she should have paid for 2020 and 2021.
“Once made aware of the oversight, I took immediate corrective action, including making payment in full to the county,” Guzman said in a written statement issued by the mayor’s office.
Kaegi’s office also could have made his former employee pay penalties and interest but didn’t.
But his staff has said the assessor’s office takes responsibility, saying it failed to update Guzman’s assessment file after she moved out of the condo in 2019 to her then-husband’s home on the Northwest Side.
Guzman now lives in a condo in Bronzeville, claiming a homeowner’s exemption there. Under Illinois law, that property tax break is allowed for an owner-occupied property for a person’s primary residence.
But she also was getting the same tax break on the South Loop condo even though she hadn’t lived there for seven years.
Guzman has said she didn’t realized that the assessor kept giving her the tax breaks on the South Loop condo. She gave two reasons for not knowing, saying her lender paid the property taxes with money from her escrow account and that she never changed the mailing address on those tax bills, which still get mailed to her ex-husband’s house four years after they divorced.
Guzman bought the South Loop condo in 2007. She was living there in December 2018 when Kaegi appointed her deputy assessor, a job that had her overseeing thousands of homeowner exemptions.
She left Kaegi’s staff in January 2020 to take a job as budget director for Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, then left that post in May 2023 when Johnson made her the city of Chicago budget director.