FL Exemption Processing

Our Florida Clients need the ability to essentially ignore the usual process for applying exemptions to a property in favor of forcing the full granting of a user specified amount.  The intent is to circumvent the usual rules for calculating exemption values so that a single property may allow for a HEX and HEX-A exemption that does not conform to the 25,000 limit for HEX, and 25,000 Limit for HEX-A.

In order to do this, the changes have been made to the Exemption process in PACS as outlined in the following sections of this document.

• The exemption Definition dialog has been modified to include a new checkbox flag displayed under the “User Specified Amount” Radio Control option labeled “Override Calculation”.

• • The option will only be enabled if the “User Specified Amount” option is selected.
  • The flag will indicate to the recalculation process that it should ignore all other exemption rules and grant the user specified amount against the full assessed value of the property regardless of value type classification (SOH vs. NSOH).

• The user will be expected to create new exemption definitions named differently but that are otherwise identical to the HEX and HEX-A exemptions, but with “User Specified Amount” selected and the “Override Calculation” checkbox checked.

• The user will be expected to add the “Mass HEX” and “Mass HEX-A” exemption to a property as a replacement to the traditional HEX and HEX-A exemption, *NOT* in addition to the HEX and HEX-A exemption.  It will be the user’s responsibility to determine the amount to grant for these exemptions for each property associated with the exemptions.

• If a property has an exemption associated with it that has the “Override Calculation” checked and another exemption that *does not* have the “Override Calculation” checkbox checked, then the recalculation process will add a recalculation error to the property stating, “Exemptions with the ‘Override Calculation’ flag checked may not be combined with exemptions that do not have the ‘Override Calculation flag checked.  Exemption amounts will not be applied to the property until the exemptions are corrected.”  This recalc error will occur if the property has any other exemption on it that is system calculated so, if you need other exemptions to coexist with the newly created multi Hex exemption, you will need to create new exemptions with the same statutes and dor codes but with override calculations and the user will have to manually enter the exemption amount.

• In order for property value to be properly classified as SOH vs. NSOH, all owners with interest in the property to be classified as SOH must be associated with the new “Mass HEX” exemption.EXAMPLE:Here is an example where the HEX exemption has been replace by the MHEX exemption and set to grant 75,000 for the exemption:
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• The MEXA exemption is set up similarly:
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When setup appropriately, PACS will apply the full exemption amounts against the full assessed value of the property for the MHEX exemption and MHEXA exemption for all levies except the school levy.  With respect to the school levy, the exemption definition dictates that it does not apply to school assessed value.  So, after calculating values for the property, the resulting values panel of the property for this example looks like the following:

The exemption summary will display the results after each exemption is applied to the assessed value for that levy:

Because the statute for the newly defined Multiple Hex exemption is correctly set, reports such as the DR-403 will display the correct monetary values in the appropriate categories on page 1.

Where this will not necessarily be true is the exemption count on the DR-403EB and DR-489EB Lines 1 & 2, which reports the number of a particular type of exemption:

The MHEX exemption is actually only a single exemption on the property as far as PACS data is concerned and counts as 1 exemption on the report, even though technically, the exemption “represents” multiple HEX exemptions for owners on the property.