A change is coming to a refund policy from the Monroe County Clerk’s office that will impact you if you’re buying or selling a home.
Monroe County Clerk Adam Bello announced that his office will now issue full refunds for overpayments on deed and mortgage recordings. This reverses a former policy that capped the refund to taxpayers at $5, while the county pocketed the rest of the refund as revenue. Bello says that the County collected an average of $15,000 a year in overpayments since 2010, which is when the County started tracking the revenue.
According to a statement from Bello, the overages occur in the recording of land records, when homebuyers and sellers write checks to cover closing costs in a home purchase transaction. The payments are sent to the County Clerk’s office where a staff member calculates the true cost and determines if an overpayment was made.
“This isn’t the County’s money to keep, it belongs to the Monroe County taxpayers,” Bello said in a statement. “While this is a relatively small dollar amount in the context of the Monroe County budget or the cost of purchasing a home, it is still money unnecessarily coming out of the taxpayer’s pockets.”