The Lee County Board of Commissioners has received information from Mr. Philip Husain, the Chair of the Lee County Board of Tax Assessors, regarding some issues in connection with the calculation of the annual rollback rate for county ad valorem taxes related to the 2025 tax digest.
Mr. Husain was appointed to the Board of Tax Assessors by the Board of Commissioners on December 9, 2025, so he was not a member of the Tax Assessors Board when the calculation of the annual rollback rate for 2025 occurred. He was elected as Chair by the other members of the Tax Assessors Board at his first Board meeting and was requested to review the rollback rate for the 2025 tax year. Mr. Husain began that review process after being elected Chair. Such detailed reviews do take time, but the Board of Commissioners has recently been advised that Mr. Husain found irregularities in the data used by the staff of the Board of Tax Assessors to determine the correct rollback rate for 2025, and that those errors were used when the Board of Tax Assessors submitted the 2025 tax digest to the Georgia Department of Revenue. The Department of Revenue also approved the tax digest, which included those errors. As a result, the 2025 ad valorem tax bills were sent to Lee County property owners with an erroneous rollback rate.
After being advised of the errors in calculating the rollback rate, the County hired McCormick Solutions Inc. to review the records of the Tax Assessors Office regarding the calculation of the 2025 rollback rate. McCormick Solutions is an experienced Georgia company that specializes in ad valorem tax assessments and related property tax issues in various counties in Georgia. After McCormick’s review, it was determined that the information provided by the staff of the Board of Tax Assessors used to calculate the 2025 rollback rate was not correct, and that, in turn, resulted in the required forms establishing the rollback rate being completed in error, all of which was consistent with Mr. Husain’s findings. Based upon further calculations, the County has been initially advised that the erroneous calculation of the 2025 rollback rate resulted in property taxpayers paying approximately $1.5 million more than they would have paid if the rollback rate had been correctly calculated for 2025.
The Board of Commissioners will be working with the Department of Revenue, the Board of Tax Assessors, and the County Commission’s legal counsel to determine the best and simplest process to finally determine the amount of property tax refund due to each Lee County taxpayer, and to distribute those refunds in an orderly manner.
The Board of Commissioners is committed to see that the errors made in those calculations for 2025 are corrected, that such errors are not made in the future, and that refunds of any overpaid property taxes are distributed as soon as it is legally possible for the County to do so.