PROVO — Utah County commissioners are upset about costly mistakes made with their tax distributions during the past year, and they're blaming the Utah State Tax Commission.
"We are just losing some confidence in what (the state tax commission) is doing," said Utah County Auditor Bryan Thompson.
Utah County Commissioner Steve White said the state needs to communicate better with counties and make sure accurate numbers are being used to calculate tax distributions.
White said discrepancies in population totals are currently causing problems for Utah County.
When reviewing money received for the unincorporated district in July, Utah County officials realized there had been a $75,000 spike from the previous month. Most counties would be delighted to get more money from the state, but because of past problems, county commissioners were leery about it.
About 50 percent of the money received for each district or city is due to population, and the other 50 percent is based on sales-tax revenue, White said.
After getting a breakdown of the numbers from the state, Utah County commissioners found that for the past year the county has been allocated money based on Census Bureau figures of 5,128 people living in the unincorporated area. The most recent census estimates, in July, put the number at 17,025.
Based on the number of households and average number of people per household, White said there should be around 12,000 people living in the unincorporated district, several thousand off from what was recorded the past two months.
State tax commission officials said they pull population numbers from the census, which is updated each year based on calculations of death and birth rates, tax and Medicaid records, and migration factors, said Rodger Johnson with the Census Bureau.
While the equation is not perfect, the census keeps improving and usually provides a good estimation, said state demographer Juliette Tennert.
Like the state, Utah County is unique because its population growth is higher than the national average and may not fit in the nation's equation as well, Tennert said.
"We don't have the expertise to be in a position to criticize those numbers," said Charlie Roberts, spokesman for the Utah State Tax Commission. "We just take the numbers for what they are."
But that's not good enough for White, who says it's the state's responsibility to catch such a discrepancy.
"This is just a matter of somebody thinking and saying, 'We know this is wrong. And how do we change this?' " he said. "There is inadequate care and due diligence taken to make sure the taxes are going to the right places."
Thompson has asked the state for a breakdown of money allocated to the unincorporated district since April — as far back as law will allow him to go. The state may owe the county money if the population estimates are incorrect, he said.
Utah County commissioners have been watching the numbers more closely since the state tax commission gave the county a bill for $451,324 last summer to cover overpayments when distributing cell phone tax revenues to the unincorporated districts from January 2005 through November 2007.
"We've already been burned once because they took back money they gave us in error," Thompson said.
Roberts said there is probably plenty of blame to go around, but the telecommunication providers reported the numbers wrong to the state.
Salt Lake County budget director Lance Brown said officials tried to warn the state as early as March 2006 that counties were being given too much money, but the state did not act on it until last summer.
The $400,000 error was discouraging for Thompson not only because the state tax commission made such a big mistake, but because the state looked at records for the previous three years, which is now against the law, he said. Action on such retroactive audits by law can only go back 90 days, according to a law passed during the most recent legislative session.
The miscalculation was also a factor in the Utah County Commission's Aug. 18 decision to raise annual property taxes by about $80 per household in the unincorporated area, Thompson said.
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