Overview
The Appellate Tax Board (ATB) did not submit an annual report for fiscal year 2018 to the Legislature. For fiscal year 2019, the annual report that ATB submitted to the Legislature was deficient: it lacked required information, including the types of matters ATB had handled during the preceding state fiscal year, the aggregate number and types of cases assigned to each member, the way each case was disposed of, and the average length of time from the date of the close of the record to the issuance of a decision. As a result, the Legislature did not have the information necessary to adequately review and assess ATB’s activities when determining the agency’s funding needs.
Authoritative Guidance
Section 4 of Chapter 58A of the Massachusetts General Laws states,
[ATB] shall report annually to the general court . . . and shall include in such report a statement of the number and type of matters handled by it during the preceding state fiscal year. . . . Such report shall further provide the aggregate number and type of cases assigned to each member, the manner by which the case was disposed of and the average length of time for issuing a decision from the date of the close of the record.
Reasons for Issue
ATB management told us that it had not completed its annual reports of all activities because there were reliability issues with the data it used for reporting. Specifically, in an email dated June 11, 2020, ATB stated,
A substantial portion of our case inventory during the fiscal year 2016 through 2019 consisted of telecommunication appeals. These appeals, which involve telecommunication providers’ equipment in hundreds of cities and towns, as well as cross-appeals filed by many municipalities, were not uniformly accounted for in the old system, resulting in a significant number of closed cases appearing as active in Time Matters. The ATB corrected this issue going forward by creating a new category of cases, labeled “T” for telecommunications, so that these cases can be accurately tracked currently. However, for the periods covered by our annual reports for fiscal years 2016 through 2019, the difficulty in determining the total number of active telecommunication cases significantly skewed our data.
Recommendation
ATB should file reports containing all of the required elements annually with the Legislature.
Auditee’s Response
We are committed to following the draft report’s recommendation that we file our annual report on an annual basis now that the data integrity and accuracy issues described in the draft report have been resolved.
| Date published: | February 9, 2021 |
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