Separate Report of Oscar Leser; A Plan for Inter-County Equalization of Assessments and the Collection of State Taxes by Apportionment to the (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: parities between county ratios as well. It is also to be remembered that no satisfactory equalization plan had then been devised in any State and that the State tax was relatively unimportant in amount. DEFECTS IN EARLY EQUALIZATION BOARDS. Equalization boards in their early history were not always satisfactory for reasons which are now quite palpable: (a) They were as a rule too large. Thus Ohio had 40 members, Minnesota 21, Arizona 13. Each of these States now has a board of 3 members. Illinois still has 26, but the demand for a change is insistent and must soon be heeded. (b) The method of selection was wrong. In nearly all of the States having boards the members were either elected from districts or they were all State officers acting ex officio in a function foreign to that for which they were primarily chosen. In Ohio, for instance, the members were elected by Senatorial districts, in Illinois by Congressional districts, in Minnesota by judicial districts, in some States by counties. (c) In the cases of sectional representation there was an absence of responsibility and accountability to the State at large. (d) The equalization usually took place at too greatly separated intervals, ranging up to ten years in at least two States. (e) The periods allowed for the sessions of the board were generally too short. It was a case of sacrificing efficiency for economy. (f) There was a general lack of power and of facilities for obtaining essential information. Sometimes there was no power to do anything except to act on "best judgment"; sometimes the board was restricted by the statute to a reliance upon official transcripts of sales. It is obvious that with a large proportion of undisclosed considerations in deeds these transcripts must have been very inadequa...