Data error causes some homeowners to get tax delinquency notices from banks

Thousands of Cook County homeowners may have received notices from their banks they owed money on tax bills they’d already been paid, based on a computer glitch by a national data firm.

The erroneous notices went out home mortgage customers in recent days, warning that the homeowner owed money on their second installment property taxes, which were due in December 2022. Some notices stated the homeowner’s bank would pay the delinquent balance and assess fees and interest to the customer.

The notices began arriving last week, just days ahead of of the Treasurer’s office mailing first installment bills for 2022, likely adding to the confusion.

The issue may have arisen because of errors in a data set provided by CoreLogic, according to a source with knowledge of the discrepancies. California-based CoreLogic boasts it offers “near real-time data” from 22,000 taxing authorities nationwide. CoreLogic did not immediately respond to questions from The Chicago Sun-Times on Friday.

If a property has no outstanding tax bill, the delinquency notifications should not have triggered any actual payments by banks, because the Treasurer’s office bounces back overpayments, said Andrew Gavrilos, spokesman for Treasurer Maria Pappas.

“If we had gotten a payment on a property that did not owe taxes, we would not have let that payment go through,” Gavrilos said.

Bills for the first installment of 2022 property taxes were sent out this week to some 1.8 million property owners, Gavrilos said. Those bills are due April 3. Taxpayers can check to see what they owe and get information about tax bills from the Treasurer’s website.

Treasurer’s office did not know how many residents received the notices, which were sent out by individual banks to their customers.

Chase Bank, the largest mortgage lender in Cook County, reported 4,000 clients erroneously received letters warning of non-existent tax delinquencies. The bank has told customers affected by the error to disregard the delinquency notices, spokesman Brian Hanover said.

“Due to a system timing issue, a number of Cook County property tax accounts were incorrectly identified as delinquent, which may have triggered a letter to those taxpayers by their lender,” Hanover said. “We fixed the issue and no further action is required by our customers.”

Other major mortgage lenders did not respond to queries about whether their customers got similar notices, including CitiBank, Bank of America and Guaranteed Rate.

A similar glitch likely wouldn’t effect counties other than Cook, said DuPage County Treasurer Gwen Henry. Second installment bills weren’t issued until November in Cook County, which also gives taxpayers several months to pay before their property lands on a tax sale, Henry added.

“We don’t have any delinquent bills right now,” Henry said. “Everything is either paid up, or been moved to the tax sale.”