Nassau tax firms donate to county politicians and taxpayers lose

In 56 of the 57 New York counties outside of New York City, property owners can’t grieve taxes for three years after a successful appeal.

The exception is Nassau County, where a political action committee backed by law firms that file thousands of property tax challenges each year has donated $256,725 to Republican campaign committees, candidates and elected officials in Nassau this year.

That sounds like a lot of money to contribute toward local races. And the same group donated $1.2 million to mostly (but not exclusively) Republican candidates, led by Republican former County Executive Edward Mangano, and Republican clubs and committees supporting him, from 2009 through 2015.

The donations were cheap at the price.

In 2010, Mangano created a four-person committee of which two members, Paolo Orsini and Shalom Maidenbaum, operate huge tax certiorari firms. They helped Mangano with a plan that both froze property assessments and all but eliminated the county’s liability from the “county guarantee.” That’s a law demanding that Nassau refund overpayments that have already been disbursed to school districts and other municipalities and that cannot be clawed back, which applies in only one other county.

The plan was to settle nearly all appeals brought by the companies in the grievers’ favor. 

Once it was enacted, the firms collected $506.5 million in client fees between 2012 and 2019 — making the seed money of those political contributions a comparative pittance.

The firms earned this money by “saving” clients about $1.1 billion. But that $1.1 billion then went right back on the bills of every other property owner via increased tax rates, because once the reductions are granted, rates must rise for everyone to collect the set tax levy, the amount of money needed for the county's budget.

Homeowners don’t have to use a firm to file. But thanks to a deal between the firms and the county to streamline the process, filers who use firms fare far better on average than those who self-file. 

And because so many of Nassau’s 385,000 residential property owners do grieve — 236,332 in the 2021-2022 tax year, for instance — practically everyone but the firms and their pet politicians lose out.

Nassau has a unique property tax problem, created by inept laws and shoddy practices. Those laws and practices — like the county guarantee, assessment by the county rather than towns, and a consistent unwillingness (under Republican county executives) to assess properties and defend those values against appeals — could all be changed to mirror best practices elsewhere in the state and nation.

When a problem is clearly solvable, yet never solved, look to who benefits from the breakdown. Here the winners are the tax certiorari firms making a fortune, and the politicians getting a cut.

The losers? Practically every homeowner in Nassau County.