My STAR abatement given to previous owner

Don't fight with the city (unlikely to be worthwhile), but you could pursue it with your coop management a bit further. The benefit should have transferred as of the date you bought the apartment, and I would expect the coop to pro-rate the 2015 amount themselves based on that date.

This happened to us as well. Joe is correct--speak with your managing agent. They helped us get it sorted out, though it took a long time (typical city red-tape) and we were not able to retro-act to recover the year we missed.

This seems to be a problem with cooperatives only. I went through all sorts of nonsense over the STAR, primary residence, and veterans' abatement when I moved to a coop. I had to file 3 times and eventually everything was straightened out.it me for the veteran's abatement. I sent them my confirmation and they reversed the charges. So after THREE years of resubmitting the documents I finaly have all the abatements. Even so, the management firm forgot to credit me with the veteran's abatement. I sent them the confirmation from the city and they credited me immediately.
When I lived in condos, I was dealing with the city directly and had no problems. In a condo, you have a middle man, the managing agent.
I don't see why they sent the abatement to the previous owner. Standard procedure is to do this by apartment since pro-rating the tax credit should have been part of your closing. The managing agent is supposed to give you full credit against your maintenance.

The whole system for cooperative abatements is really stupid - these are the main problems:

A basic lack of transparency - shareholders are charged on the basis of the contents of Cooperative Property Tax Abatement Change Form submitted by their managing agent. They never see this, and lack the opportunity to sanity check for correctness prior to submission, because it goes straight from the managing agent to the DOF. Any correspondence with the DOF tends to get redirected back to the managing agent.

This makes shareholders completely dependent on the managing agent to get their abatements right, and makes it almost impossible for them to verify or correct any issues.

The managing agent has no incentive to get this right or make it easy, since the shareholder will get assessed and have to follow up on any and all problems. This sweet arrangement gives managing agents they can bill for, since shareholders can’t do it for themselves, without bearing any actual responsibility.

Also, there’s an unnecessary and confusing lag built into this system. As an example, the 2015/2016 Cooperative Property Tax Abatement Change Form was due February 15, 2016 - but is only for "changes of ownership or eligibility of cooperative units on or before January 5, 2015". By the time the form is due, the data is guaranteed to already be over 13 months old, and even older by the time the benefits and assessments get issued.

The needless lag and complexity are a bad combination. It’s more or less guaranteed that a shareholder will have a problematic first 2 or so years of ownership, and unlikely that attorneys or managing agents will be able to actually work this out at closing correctly. Far more likely is getting hit with the previous owner’s setup (if nothing else, you’d think the DOF could “reset” the abatement back to the defaults when they see an ACRIS filing).

For your first year or two of ownership, you could ask the managing agent if they have everything worked out, and either they wouldn’t have even had to submit it yet, or they would have submitted it and you’d have no way of finding out whether they “forgot” you - until, eventually, you find out the hard way - an assessment.

Is there any chance that this whole system is not just needlessly complex and poorly administered, but could actually be challenged legally for any one of these reasons? Any attorneys or law students looking for an interesting case?

I’m no tax protester, I’m happy to pay whatever the going rate is, but I think I should have the ability to submit and verify my own information for assessment, and have the assessment made in a timely fashion, like 3-6 months later, not 13+ months.

I think a large part of the problem is built into the Cooperative form of quasi ownership. Coop shareholders do not actually own any Real Property. The only parcel, tax bill, etc. is that owned by the Coop Corporation. It's only fairly recently that individual Coop sales were even recorded. My guess is that if any individual shareholder(s) did decide to bring it to court, it might get defended with a privity claim.

I agree with everything bryantpark says. I have owned two coops in NYC over the past 10 years and neither did I not get the rebate for the first two years. I was till charged the amount of the rebate as an assessment by the coop so there was really no incentive on the part of the management company to ensure that it was all sorted out properly and in a timely manner.

Yes, I agree that this is basically an unfortunate consequence of trying to make the city's innumerable abatements that relate to people (veteran, primary resident, whatever) work for co-ops.

I still think there are many reasonable arguments against the system:

Although the tax bill has the corporations name on it, the tax benefits letter breaks out abatements to individual shareholders - so it is in effect an obfuscated tax on the individuals, and *only* the individuals, because the corporation just assesses it anyway, and those individuals should have the ability to manage their own tax affairs.

Alternatively, if one argues that the property is owned by the coop corporation, then fine - coop corporations can't be veterans, primary residents, or whatever other favored classes of natural people that exist, so those classes of abatements can't apply to coops or their shareholders.

Why should co-op corporations be compelled to pay managing agents to keep track of which of its shareholders and residents are in any of the government's favored classes? If the city wants to provide a system of abatements for these people, then great - they can administer it for themselves.

Presumably this outcome of invalidating the abatements would lead to pressure to to come up with a sensible tax system that recognized that a huge amount of real estate in NYC is not owned by natural people, and less of the abatement mess that exists today.

It seems a double standard that the city gets to "see through" / "pierce the veil" of the corporation to find out about residents, but the residents can't "see through" in the other direction to verify that they're being taxed correctly. Surely it should work both ways, or no ways?

Decades ago, Coops successfully lobbied to be in a different tax class than single family homes. Unfortunately it terribly backfired. If not for that, none of this would be an issue.

Ugh, this same thing happened to me, but I am trying to get the management / board to claim responsibility for not receiving the abatements as the board members were all receiving illegal star and owner occupancy abatements but in actuality are investors.

Management never changed over my unit information from an investor to owner occupied unit because then they would have had to make every unit accurate and threaten losing our building as its client as the board was pressuring them not to change it.