Provides Taxpayers with Greater Insight Into Residential and Commercial Property Values
Press Release
The Office of the State Auditor (Office) announced on Wednesday a new tool providing taxpayers insights into real property valuation across Utah. The Property Values Tool is the result of taxpayer concerns about inequitable valuations and questions about adequate oversight.
Utah property owners are currently receiving their 2023 Notice of Property Valuation and Tax Changes. This new Property Values Tool is timed to help taxpayers review those notices within the larger context of property valuations within their neighborhoods and across their counties.
Property assessment is conducted by Utah’s county assessors. This new tool contains data provided by many of these assessors – those interested in greater transparency for taxpayers. This tool helps taxpayers, policymakers and regulators better understand property assessment in the State of Utah, allowing interested parties to examine parcel-level data across the State using different metrics. The default map shows the percent change in year-over-year property values.
State Auditor John Dougall stated, “The release of the new Property Values Tool brings greater transparency to Utah taxpayers. The Utah constitution requires uniform and equal treatment of properties in Utah. This tool will help Utahns better monitor that effort. We appreciate the support of the many dedicated and hardworking county assessors and their interest in greater transparency. I’d especially like to thank Chris Stavros, Salt Lake County Assessor, for his excellent feedback, responsiveness in sending and improving data, and his vision for how greater transparency can improve county assessment processes.”
Chris Stavros, Salt Lake County Assessor, shared, “The public needs a tool like this, bringing transparency to the property valuation process and highlighting the critical work done by assessors across the State of Utah.”
The Office compiled property assessment data from county assessors and integrated it into this unified property valuation tool. The underlying data comes directly from county assessors. We added standardized property types and tax exemption classifications to improve searchability, but included original parcel description information.
The Property Values Tool can be viewed at PropertyValues.utah.gov or on Transparent Utah at transparent.utah.gov.
About the Office of the State Auditor
The Office of the State Auditor provides Utah taxpayers and government officials with an independent assessment of financial operation, statutory compliance, and performance management for state and local government.
Specific activities of the Office include performing financial audits, conducting Federal funds compliance audits, providing local government oversight, conducting agency and program performance audits, performing fraud and compliance audits, and operating the State Auditor Hotline for citizens to report suspected financial issues or improprieties. These capabilities strengthen Utah State Government and help taxpayers have confidence in the integrity of Utah’s government agencies.
The Office hosts the State Privacy Officer who focuses on strengthening the privacy practices of governmental entities, such as cities, counties, school districts, and colleges and universities, and is tasked in statute with focusing on government care of personal information to reduce the risk to individual privacy.
The Office also provides interactive graphical tools to help taxpayers and policymakers gain greater insight into governmental financial activities. These tools include the Transparent Utah Public Finance website (transparent.utah.gov) as well as the award-winning Project KIDS public education analysis dashboards (auditor.utah.gov/kids) and the Utah Health Cost Compare project (healthcost.utah.gov) to assist consumers in understanding the cost of health procedures.
The State Auditor is a Constitutional Officer of the State of Utah, elected directly by the state’s citizens every four years. The role of the State Auditor is authorized in Article VII, Section 15 of the Utah Constitution. For more information, see auditor.utah.gov.