State Homestead Taxpayer Reimbursement

Please find the following guidance from the state treasurer regarding “An Act to Return Funds to Maine Property Tax Payers”. Checks will begin to process January 8th and continue until all 310,000 checks have been issued.

Timing of check payments

Due to the large volume of payments, we will process 20,000 per day for 4 days each week. A full list of payment batches and what municipality will be impacted can be found on the State Treasurer’s website. Additionally, we will update the public daily through social media; our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/MaineOST/.

Property Tax Hotline Set up

In anticipation of constituent inquiries, we have set up an operational “hotline” January through March. That number is 207-624-7477, option 3 and will be live between 8:30 am and 4:00 pm Monday through Friday.

Correcting Errors to Checks

The process for correcting checks will begin at our office. We will record requests from constituents and will send a formatted file to each municipality to confirm the requested changes. Only after confirmation will we make changes to a check. We will compile requests and limit the number of emails. Constituents who have moved and have the wrong address can be updated by our office by providing the last four digits of their SSN. We will also share these address changes with you so you can also update your records.

Insufficient Data Coming Back to You

We have accumulated approximately 7,000 unusable names in our database. These include names with “Trustee” and no trust, names with an “and” but no second owner and several other errors that make it impossible to create checks. We will send these back to municipalities to correct and will not send a check until required to do so by law. We will be collecting information for these properties at our call center as requests are made.