Preparing for your property tax appraisal protest hearing

About: Property tax, property valuation, council tax, legaltech.

To win the review board, extreme preparation is necessary. One of the most convincing defenses that the board will hear is that the value of your property is lower than expected because of damages, cracks, unfinished works, cosmetic issues, etc.., and that strong digital evidence is presented.

it is a widely known pratice to take pictures of the issues including the main title of the daily newspaper, although It is a good practice it is quite insufficient. These pictures only show digital evidence taken after a specific moment, it just provides non-anteriority which is only one of the several properties that determines the probative value of digital evidence.

At least three more properties are missing.
1. Proof that the digital evidence was taken “before” and not “after” a specific moment in time. Which is the normal and traditional timestamping meaning, exactly as it was happening in the old mail offices, when an officer was sealing a paper document with a timestamp.
2. Proof of the integrity of the digital evidence, meaning that the content has not been fraudulently manipulated after a specific moment.
3. A governmental authority certifying the four legally relevant properties of the digital evidence mentioned before (not anteriority, non posteriority, integrity, public authority).

The European Union has established a comprehensive working system for trusted & qualified certification authorities, for this purpose. Since it is the most restrictive standard in the world it certainly has a very high legal relevance throughout the world.

Certifydoc made this certification process easy for everyone via the https://www.certifydoc.eu platform.

Trusted qualified timestamping is a WW standard based on the EU eIDAS regulation: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=uriserv%3AOJ.L_.2014.257.01.0073.01.ENG

My final advice for this specific case is also to make also short videos because they provides additional advantages compared to pictures only.

• They are more difficult to manipulate than pictures
• More than one person can be present in the video, thus providing an important opportunity, where applicable, to testify in court
• It is possible to talk while the video goes showing the status of the house
• The newspaper title can be shown or simply referred to

The combination of videos, pictures and any other electronic document can then be  certified and received in few seconds via email also using a mobile device, ready for presentation at the Property Tax Appraisal Protest Hearing.

Please feel free to use it and send me feedback.