Back in 2004, we were hired to conduct an assessment of the New York City tax assessment system.
The first phase, data collection, took much longer than it should have. The City of New York’s Department of Finance (“DOF”) made it extremely difficult for us to obtain the data. To start the process, we submitted a FOIL (e.g., Freedom of Information Law) request to the DOF that requested assessment and transaction information for all sales city-wide that was recorded in 2003. The expectation was that the assessment data would be provided to us from the assessment roll (otherwise known as “RPAD” – Real Property Assessment Data) and the transaction information, with information such as sales price, sales date, and involved parties would be provided from the City’s database that calculated transfer taxes. We were surprisingly informed by DOF that access to the sales transaction data could not be granted as it was “tax secret” information.
This was untrue; it was public information. They just didn’t want to provide it.
Whether this was an attempt on the part of the City to stonewall, or it was a matter of incompetence, we were not deterred.
We applied political pressure from interested parties; they did release the data, but even so, it was not provided to us in a form that we could read.
Rather than continue the fight head-on, we resorted to “screen scraping” the transaction data from DOF’s online data system, “ACRIS”. When the DOF informed the author that the data was “confidential”, it forgot that all of the data was
available online if one was willing to download the information parcel-by-parcel for the entire City of New York.
The results of the study were explosive, and we ended up making it onto page 2 of the New York Post.
To view the original study and the subsequent news coverage, see below.
“PROP-TAX ‘BLUNDER’ COSTS CITY BILLION$”, NY Post, 12/3/2004