Metro

Co-Oops! City goof overtaxes homes

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The city’s Finance Department made a monumental blunder in the property-tax rolls, mistakenly boosting market values on some co-ops by as much as 147 percent, The Post has learned.

The whopping error then left the department scrambling to reduce the values of the 139 affected co-ops — mostly in Queens — by more than $300 million.

Officials blame a computer error for providing incorrect data to assessors, who then used the numbers to set the values on the units.

“There was a glitch,” admitted Finance Department spokesman Owen Stone.

The increased values were for the upcoming year, and no resident overpaid in taxes.

Stone explained that co-ops, by law, have to be valued as if they were rental properties.

To get those values, a computer program searches for nearby “comparable” rental units and assigns their income to the co-op in question.

But somehow, this year, a newly installed computer system searched for nearby commercial properties — where rents can be double or triple a residential rental building — and transferred those incomes to the co-ops.

The results were predictable:

* The 2,904-unit Glen Oaks Village saw its market value shoot up 86 percent.

* Cryder Point complex in Whitestone skyrocketed 147 percent.

* The nearby Le Havre complex zoomed 122 percent.

Owners were left howling.

For months, Finance Commissioner David Frankel defended the numbers generated by his agency as accurate.

Frankel explained that Queens co-ops had been undervalued for years and that a new methodology had captured the true values.

And in what amounted to an act of charity, Frankel decided to cap market-value increases at 50 percent for this year only.

But all hell broke loose when the Finance Department finally got around to posting the “comparable” properties it used on its Web site.

Glen Oaks Village President Bob Friedrich said all five comparables used for his complex turned out to be wrong.

“They wanted to reach a certain conclusion,” he charged, “but they got caught red handed.”

Friedrich isn’t the only one who feels there was an attempt to rig the system to produce more tax revenues for the city.

“When they programmed the computer, they were looking for numbers to back into,” said one source involved in co-op issues. “You couldn’t get the result any other way.”

Stone insisted that’s not the case.

About 15 percent of the city’s 4,870 co-ops, or 693 properties, were reviewed. Their market values, which form the basis for assessments and tax bills, were taken down from $1.3 billion to $989 million.

That was still above the $739 million valuation now on the books, so taxes on those properties will still be going up.

City Councilman Mark Weprin (D-Queens) has scheduled a hearing to examine the tax rolls on May 2.

“We’re trying to get to the bottom of this,” he said.

Pumped-up value

The city Finance Department has discovered a $300M accounting error by which it overvalued co-ops for tax purposes:

* 139 co-ops mostly in Queens

* $339M in over-assessed values

* 147% increases in taxable value for some units this year

* Finance is scrambling to reduce the values and correct their books before taxes are due

david.seifman@nypost.com