When Marilyn Porges’ husband died in 1994, the last thing she thought about was property tax relief. But she recently discovered that she like many other survivors of veterans missed out on a little-known tax benefit that could have saved her hundreds of dollars.

Marilyn’s husband, Mel, was a World War II veteran, but he hadn’t gone to Veterans Administration hospitals during his lengthy illness, nor had he applied for any veterans’ benefits.

After Mel’s death from cancer, Marilyn Porges went into the Deschutes County Assessor’s Office to remove his name from their deed.

The assessor’s office receives copies of all death certificates filed in Deschutes County, said Judy Major, assessment technician, and a deceased person’s name is automatically removed from a property deed. There is no indication of veteran status on the death certificate, she said, unless that person had been receiving tax adjustment benefits.

Her husband’s name had already been removed from the deed, Porges said, so she just kept paying her property taxes.

Then in January, the Bend woman read a letter to the editor in The Bulletin regarding a property tax break for widows of veterans, and found she would have been entitled to a property tax break since 1994.

”When a woman loses her husband, with the funeral arrangements and everything, the last thing she thinks about is applying for property tax relief,” Porges said. ”You don’t know to ask, and nobody tells you.”

Porges applied to Deschutes County for retroactive tax breaks back to 1994, and her request was denied, according to a Feb. 5 letter from the Deschutes County Assessor’s Office, because Porges filed too late.

Porges said she is ”outraged,” and is planning an appeal to the Oregon Department of Revenue.

”The Veterans Administration said they don’t have anything to do with it, (notifying spouses of veterans of their benefits) and the county doesn’t notify surviving spouses about their benefits,” Porges said. ”Why doesn’t the state just put something on the back of the tax bills?”

Since 1953, Oregon state law has granted widows or widowers of honorably discharged military veterans a property tax assessment adjustment. The adjustment reduces the amount of assessed value, depending on how the spouse of the deceased veteran qualifies, which results in lower taxes.

The property assessment reduction is either $12,020 or $9,020 annually, depending on how the spouse of the deceased veteran qualifies, according to the Deschutes County Tax Assessor’s Office. Income level or property value are not a consideration.

If the deceased veteran died of a service-connected illness or disability and was certified as 40 percent disabled, the spouse can receive the higher amount, said Pat Faibian, database manager for the Deschutes County Assessor’s Office.

A veteran with a 40-percent disability that is non-service connected, as certified by the Department of Veterans Affairs, qualifies for the $9,020 adjustment, Faibian said, and so does the spouse of any deceased, honorably-discharged veteran.

There are currently about 1,150 veterans in Deschutes County taking advantage of the tax break, Faibian said, and the VA estimates there are about 18,000 veterans in Central Oregon.

The problem with informing people about the adjustment, Faibian said, is that assessors have no way of determining veteran status unless the person in question was a disabled veteran already getting an adjustment on his or her tax bill.

”Unless someone tells us, we have no way of knowing if a person is a vet or not,” Faibian said. ”We have pamphlets available on the veteran tax adjustment at the assessor’s office, but we can’t tell who to give them to.”

A possible solution might be to notify funeral homes about the adjustment, said Dan Martin, deputy tax collector for Crook County.

”It is almost impossible for us to keep track of a person’s veteran status,” Martin said. ”If someone comes in, we’ll try to point them in the right direction for all their tax breaks, but we don’t have the manpower to keep track of and notify everyone.”

Some funeral homes are already notifying survivors of the veteran’s tax adjustment. Travis Sandusky, manager of Redmond Memorial Chapel, said funeral directors should know what veterans’ benefits are available to clients.

”We ask if the deceased was a veteran, and we’ll ask for discharge papers and file for everything, including the property tax adjustment,” Sandusky said. ”It’s the funeral director’s job to be able to convey all those benefits to the family.”

Porges estimates she would save between $150 and $200 annually on the taxes on her $100,000 home. The issue, she said, is not the money as much as it is the fairness of the issue.

”Something needs to be done to notify people,” Porges said. ”The amount of money doesn’t sound like much, but there are a lot of widows out there on fixed incomes who could really use it.”

For more information on the veteran’s tax adjustment, contact your county tax assessor’s office.

*Crook County: 541-447-4133

*Deschutes County: 541-388-6508.

*Jefferson County: 541-475-2443.