Friday, Dec. 29 of last year will be remembered as one of the busiest days ever at auditor/treasurer departments at county government centers across the U.S.

 

That was the cutoff date for people to pre-pay their 2018 property taxes to avoid losing part of their itemized deductions under the new tax bill passed by the feds.

 

“It was pretty intense here,” sad Wright County Deputy Auditor/Treasurer Tammy Vaith. “We didn’t expect it to be that busy.”

 

The new tax law, which went into effect the first of the year, caps deductions for state and local income and property taxes at $10,000. The bill  prevents people from prepaying state income taxes, but it doesn’t address prepayment of property taxes. By pre-paying next year's property taxes in 2017, people were hoping to save thousands of dollars by writing off the deductions on their 2017 return.

 

The majority of taxpayers don’t itemize deductions. And many who do will never reach the $10,000 plateau since their combined taxes are low enough to keep them under the limit.

 

But property owners with expensive homes or multiple properties were able to benefit one last time before the bill went into effect for taxes payable in 2019. 

 

Vaith says people were always allowed to pay their property taxes in advance. Usually in Minnesota it was “snowbirds” who wouldn’t be around at tax time. In other instances, mortgage companies would prepay taxes in advance as part of an escrow account.

 

But all those regular pre-ayers were joined by thousands of other people across the country this year.

 

Vaith says in Wright County, about 2,300 people pre-paid almost $7.3 million before the first of the year. That’s a huge jump from 2016, when  308 people paid about $290,000 in advance, and 204 paid out $304,000 the year before.

 

It was the same with long lines in Sherburne County, said Auditor/Treasurer Diane Arnold.

 

“We’re always busy at the end of the year, but that was a lot of extra work,” she said.

 

As of end of the day Dec. 29, the auditor/treasurer’s office had collected $2,380,167.72 in 2018 pre-paid taxes, not counting credit card payments that still had to be processed.

 

That was a big difference from the previous four years when the office collected $63,000 in 2016, $19,000 in 2015, $22,000 in 2014 and $31,000 in 2013.

 

The auditor/treasurer’s office is unlikely to see those long lines again unless the feds make other changes to the tax bill.