These three departments handle different aspects of your property taxes. Some counties merge these departments because they are smaller and don’t have a need for three separate departments. Everything begins with the Assessor’s Office, first in determining what is assessable and then handling the valuation of that re-assessment and all of these determinations are made by your state law. When something is determined to be assessable it goes through a process within the Assessor’s Office to determine the value for that particular event. At the end of the fiscal year all of the values for the year are sent to the Auditor-Controller to apply the correct tax rate (percentage) to each property which varies in each tax rate area and determines the actual dollar amount you owe. The tax rate is usually a percentage of the value determined by the Assessor. Additionally, if in a particular tax rate area there is a special assessment or other types of taxes such as direct assessments they get added on by the Auditor-Controller. Then finally that information is sent to the Tax Collector who sends out the bills, collects the money and deposits it into the County Treasury.  These three departments make up the property tax branch of your local county government and each handle their responsibilities separately.

For example if you found out you had a lien or delinquent taxes on your property that were due, you would need to go to the Tax Collector to pay them and have the lien removed and the records brought up to date. However, if you had an issue with the amount of taxes or the value in which your taxes are based on you would need to contact the Assessor’s Office because that is what the Assessor is responsible for. For example if you had a value issue, you would go to your Assessor, and how to do this is detailed in both the California Little Black Book and also the National Little Black Book. Then once the value is adjusted by the Assessor it would get sent to the Auditor-Controller who would adjust the actual dollar amount owed who would then forward that value to the Tax Collector where you would receive your adjusted bill. Generally the two offices that handle public service are the Assessor and the Tax Collector, the Auditor-Controller is the silent partner. Generally, any public service issue that needs to be resolved with the Auditor-Controller is requested by the Assessor.

This can be an intricate process and sometimes values are adjusted by the Assessor and somehow the actual bills sent out by the Tax Collector are not adjusted. This happens when the Auditor-Controller, for whatever reason has not adjusted the right bill or there was some sort of processing error. Remember all of these departments are mass processing organizations and they do the best they can however it is your responsibility to make sure that your values are accurate. When this happens a special request needs to be sent by the Assessor to have a particular value adjusted and then that will be forwarded to the Tax Collector who will issue a correct bill. Remember all issues can and will be resolved with a little bit of effort, education and patience.