Cook County property tax bills will be late again this year, the treasurer’s office bluntly affirmed this week, as various offices continue to try to catch up from last year’s troubles and address lingering ones.
At a hearing of the county’s technology committee, department leaders briefed the county board on the bad news, plus progress of the ongoing property tax upgrade. Commissioners’ key concerns were what to tell homeowners about bill timing or long-delayed refunds and local libraries and schools about detailed revenue projections.
Vice Chair Sean Morrison asked how confident the treasurer’s office was that bills would go out on time this summer.
“On time meaning Aug. 1? Virtually — not, not going to happen,” said David Byrnes, chief of staff to Treasurer Maria Pappas, whose office mails the bills.
“This is just like the R-rated version of the movie ‘Groundhog Day,’” Morrison deadpanned.
County Board President Toni Preckwinkle would not take a stab Thursday at predicting when property owners will get bills, suggesting the treasurer’s office spoke too soon. “There’s no way to predict that at this moment in time, and it would be inappropriate for us to speculate,” she told reporters. “So we’re going to wait and get a little through the process here and see where we are.”
The likely delay is not a complete surprise. County officials have noted delays from prior years often take a few cycles to recover from because assessments, appeals and final calculations happen on a rolling basis.
Typically, first installment bills are mailed in February and due at the start of March. Second installment bills are usually mailed in July and due at the start of August. Last year, second installment bills weren’t mailed until November, and first installment bills this year were due at the start of April. This year’s delay was on purpose to give taxpayers more financial breathing room between bills.
Right now, the cycle is in the Board of Review’s hands. Still-undecided appeals will help determine when the next set of bills might land.
The three-member appeals body opened its last session in July 2024 and finalized most of its numbers in early May 2025. But because a key calculation — the tax rate — was delayed until November amid ongoing tech upgrades, the board couldn’t finalize all of its appeal decisions, Chief Deputy Commissioner William O’Shields said in an email Thursday. More complicated commercial cases were on hold and took longer, triggering at least some delay.
Adding to it: This year, the board started later and received a record 290,000 appeals. That’s the biggest number for a year when Chicago wasn’t being reassessed. Likely adding to the pile is the fact the board reopened appeals countywide in December, saying they hoped to give all property taxpayers a shot at reductions after a bruising year for Chicago taxpayers in particular. Board of Review members acknowledged back then that the extra appeals window might delay bills.
Byrnes said the Board of Review suggested in meetings this week they wouldn’t be done hearing appeals until the first week of June. O’Shields said even that date was tentative at best, given the delayed start and volume of complaints.
After the board is finished hearing, ruling on and processing those appeals, their final numbers must still be sent back to the assessor, shipped down to the state’s Department of Revenue, then back to the assessor to apply exemptions. Those get sent to the clerk for additional calculations, then the treasurer for final mailing. The process at each office can take days or weeks.
Current problems with Tyler Technologies, the Texas-based firm the county contracted with a decade ago to modernize its property tax software, aren’t adding to bill delays, but Bureau of Technology officials said Wednesday they are closely monitoring any “major critical defects with Tyler that may impede second installment processes.”
There are other problems linked with the unfinished upgrade, however: 3,500 bills still haven’t been sent dating back to November, tens of thousands of refunds are unpaid and there is continued trouble communicating how much revenue taxing bodies should expect and when they should arrive.
Once completed, the upgrades are meant to streamline data transfers across all of the property tax offices and finally move the county off of decades-old mainframe systems that cost $6.5 million annually to maintain. While the major offices are all using Tyler’s system to generate bills, a final launch has been delayed repeatedly as new fixes for refunds and handling of overdue payments often uncover fresh and unexpected problems to solve.
“We’re finding many, many more defects, which come from edge cases,” Tom Lynch, the head of the county’s Bureau of Technology, told commissioners Wednesday. The county can’t issue mass refunds, for example, because it often has to manually review problems with each property to find resolution.
Approximately 87,000 taxpayers are owed refunds at this point, Byrnes said.
“Each one of these defects is kind of its own story and there is no global fix for them,” Byrnes said, declining to give any estimates of how long it takes for staff to process each refund. “We are being overly cautious to make sure we don’t over- or under-refund taxpayers accordingly.”
Refund calculations can be especially difficult. Certain refunds can accumulate earned interest if they were paid back late. Late tax payments can be deducted from those refunds, or might need to have a certificate of error applied for a missing exemption or incorrect assessment.
Commissioners suggested the treasurer try to calculate and pay those refunds outside Tyler’s system. Byrnes said that would be a “tremendous” risk because the office would have to manually input the data back into Tyler’s system later, potentially messing up how much revenue each taxing body should receive.
Taxing agencies are receiving their revenue from the county from the latest tax bills paid — including $3 billion distributed last week alone — but the county can’t yet report key details of those payments by tax year, for example, nor how much subagencies like smaller school and library districts are owed.
