Auditor general to review N.B. assessments

New Brunswick’s auditor general will review the province’s property assessment system in the wake of a series of errors, while a former judge who was examining the same issue is bowing out.

The reviews were launched after a whistleblower alleged in March that more than 2,000 property owners were given improper and inflated tax bills. Premier Brian Gallant has said his government is committed to getting to the bottom of the thousands of mistakes with assessments going back to 2011.

On April 3, the government announced that former Court of Appeal justice, Joseph Robertson, had agreed to undertake a review.

But Monday, Attorney General Serge Rousselle announced that Robertson is discontinuing his probe — citing the potential for overlap with a review being done by auditor general Kim MacPherson.

“We were comfortable that both of them could do the review, but obviously former justice Robertson decided to discontinue his review. We respect that and thank him for his service,” Rousselle told a news conference in Fredericton.

In a separate release Monday, Service New Brunswick said that as of June 1, they had reissued 1,858 bills to property owners that had an arbitrary formula applied to their March bill.

It said that 93 per cent of the reissued bills decreased, six per cent stayed the same and one per cent increased.

To date, Service New Brunswick has received 16,416 requests from property owners for a review of their property tax assessments. So far 23 per cent have been processed, and it could be early next year before they are all processed.

Robertson said he was engaged to perform an independent review and that two people seeking the same information could cause a number of problems, such as compromising anonymity and confidentiality of staff within Service New Brunswick.