Cook County Treasurer's Office - 8/29/2001

Cook County Treasurer Maria Pappas said today the second installment of property-tax bills for the year 2000 could be mailed in late September, and the "due date" for final payment likely would be November 1.

Taxpayers whose payments are received on or before the due date would avoid penalties of 1.5 percent per month. By law, the Treasurer's Office must mail the bills at least 30 days before the due date.

While the Treasurer's Office collects property taxes, the bills are the result of work that takes months of other offices -- the County Assessor's Office sets the taxable value of property and approves exemptions, the County Board of Review hears appeals, the Illinois Department of Revenue sets the "equalizer" to make taxes in Illinois' 102 counties uniform, and the County Clerk balances government requests (levies) against legal limits to compute the tax rates.

Pappas said the Clerk's Office has advised her that it expects to finish its work by mid-September, and her office then could order bills printed and mailed -- a process that takes about two weeks. Cook County, the second-largest county in the nation, has 1.6 million pieces of property.

Yearly, the Cook County Treasurer's Office collects about $8 billion in property taxes. Taxes for a given year are collected in the next year in two installments. First-installment taxes for 2000 were due March 1.