So just lower the tax rate to .5% for the next 15 years to balance it out.
In my state, there is a time limit for abating a tax. If you overpaid a 2010 income tax, then you should have realized it within xxx days of filing your return. Suppose, for example, you are talking with your neighbor and he says that houses with solar panels are allowed do deduct $200 from your state income tax. Just because you put the solar panels on your house 12 years ago, you can’t amend your 2011 tax return. It’s history and you blew it by not amending your tax return within the required time limit.
In this particular case, I surprised that someone didn’t notice this discrepancy way back in 2007 or 2008 at the latest.
That’s for when you make a mistake filling out your tax return and paid too much tax. That’s not what happened here - in this case , the instructions on the tax return told people that they owed 1.5% tax on their income rather than 1%. Maybe it was tax tables, maybe there was a line that said “multiply taxable income by .015” but the mistake was not made by the taxpayers. Nobody was going to find out in 2008 that the ordinance allowing the extra half percent was supposed to expire in 2007 unless for some crazy reason they traced the history of the ordinance back to 1995 to see that the sunset date was left out when the ordinances were updated and published in 1996.
Now, the law may still say the taxpayers are out of luck and the city may not be able to refund the money - but it’s not like the taxpayers made a mistake- it’s more like you were sent a property tax bill calculated at the wrong rate. And even when you looked up the tax code, the published code itself had an incorrect rate.