How We Research, Verify, Screenshot & Publish — Standards You Can Hold Us To
This page sets out our editorial principles, the six-tier source hierarchy that underpins every county guide, our manual screenshot-verification practice, our handling of deadline-sensitive content, our conflicts-of-interest policy, the eight-step verification process every page passes through, the heightened-review cadence around state protest deadlines, and the corrections process we follow when we get something wrong.
What’s on this page
1. Editorial Mission
county-cad.us/ exists to make U.S. county-level property assessment information easy to find and act on, on time. The audience is broad: a homeowner who just received a notice of appraised value and has 14 days to file a Notice of Protest, a senior applying for the over-65 exemption for the first time, an agricultural landowner navigating 1-d-1 qualification, a business owner preparing the annual BPP rendition, a real estate investor researching tax sales, an out-of-state buyer learning their new state's framework, an attorney preparing for an ARB hearing. Every page is written so a non-expert reader can find the right office, understand the right procedure, hit the right deadline, and reach the right desk on the first try.
2. The Manual-Verification Standard
Every county-level office, every URL, every phone number, every address, every form, and every deadline on county-cad.us/ is verified by a human editor against the agency's own published page. We do not auto-scrape. We do not pull from third-party databases. We do not generate content from a stale snapshot of the web. Every contact is human-verified before publication and re-verified on a quarterly cycle, with a heightened-review window in the 60 days before each state's primary protest deadline.
3. Screenshot Capture Practice — What’s New
When an editor verifies a county portal, the verification includes manually capturing a screenshot of the live agency interface — homepage, property search portal, exemption application form, online protest filing tool, ARB hearing scheduler. The screenshot is dated and stored. When we describe how a portal works in our walkthrough, the description matches the screenshot we captured. When the agency redesigns the portal, we re-verify, re-capture, and update the walkthrough. This is the discipline that distinguishes “we describe what the portal probably does” from “we describe what the portal actually does, as we saw it.”
Screenshots are stored internally and used for editorial reference. We do not republish agency-portal screenshots on the site (to avoid copyright complications and to encourage readers to visit the agency’s own page). Where a walkthrough refers to a specific button label, form field, or navigation path, that reference reflects the screenshot we captured at verification time.
4. Independence
We are not affiliated with any state Department of Revenue (Texas Comptroller, California State Board of Equalization, Florida Department of Revenue, etc.), the International Association of Assessing Officers (IAAO), the National Association of Counties (NACo), the IRS, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, FEMA, the U.S. Census Bureau, any property-tax-consultant firm, any property-tax-protest service, any law firm, any title or escrow company, any real estate brokerage, or any county appraisal district, county assessor, or county property appraiser. Our publication is privately operated and editorially independent. Decisions about what to cover, how to describe procedures, and what we link to are made by editorial staff, not by advertisers.
5. Six-Tier Source Hierarchy
Every page is built using a tested source hierarchy. Higher-tier sources govern when sources conflict.
Tier 1 — County appraisal district / county assessor / county property appraiser
The county-level office is the primary source for that county’s procedures, contact details, valuation methods, exemption rules, protest deadline, and ARB or appeals-board contact. We use the agency’s published page, not third-party summaries.
Tier 2 — State coordinator (Texas Comptroller, California BOE, Florida DOR, etc.)
State-level coordinators provide oversight, framework, and authoritative current-year deadline reference where state law sets a uniform deadline.
Tier 3 — National coordinating bodies (IAAO, NACo)
The International Association of Assessing Officers (assessment standards, education) and the National Association of Counties (county directory, county research).
Tier 4 — Federal cross-references (IRS, VA, FEMA, Census)
IRS Pub. 530, IRC § 164 SALT cap, VA disabled-veteran exemption coordination, FEMA disaster relief, Census property tax revenue data.
Tier 5 — State and county statutes & regulations
State property tax codes (Texas Tax Code, California Revenue and Taxation Code, Florida Statutes Ch. 192–200), state administrative codes, state public-records / sunshine laws, county-specific rules of practice for ARB or appeals boards.
Tier 6 — Court decisions & peer-reviewed research
State supreme court property tax decisions, federal court decisions where applicable, IAAO peer-reviewed publications, GAO reports on federal property-tax-adjacent programs (HUD, USDA agricultural programs). Background context only — never sole source for a current portal URL or deadline.
6. Eight-Step Verification Process
- Identify the right source. County-level office on the county’s .gov domain, cross-checked against the state coordinator (Texas Comptroller PTAD directory, California BOE assessor directory, Florida DOR property-appraiser directory) and against IAAO and NACo references.
- Verify URL is live. A human editor clicks every link before publication and confirms the destination page is the actual page (not a redirect to the county homepage, not a 404, not a stale cached version).
- Capture screenshots manually. The verifying editor manually takes a screenshot of the agency portal interface — homepage, property search, exemption application page, online protest filing tool — dated and stored for editorial reference.
- Dial-test phone numbers. Main line, exemption line, protest hotline, ARB scheduling — each tested.
- Verify addresses against agency contact pages and USPS ZIP+4 lookup. Multi-office counties (Harris CAD, LA County Assessor) have field offices; each is captured separately.
- Document procedures from the agency’s own published rules. Notice of Protest deadline, exemption application workflow, ARB hearing rules, evidence rules — captured from the agency’s published guidance, not third-party summary.
- Cross-reference state and federal layer. State statute citations, IRS Pub. 530, VA exemption coordination — current and live.
- Editor sign-off. A second editor reviews the page end-to-end before publication, including a fresh check on the not-tax-advice and not-legal-advice notices, the deadline accuracy, and any confidentiality-program note where a county runs one.
7. Deadline Tracking — Heightened Review Cadence
Every county guide is re-reviewed every quarter under our default cycle. In the 60 days before each state’s primary protest deadline, county pages in that state are re-reviewed on a heightened cadence — typically weekly for high-traffic pages, with a same-day update path for any county whose deadline has materially shifted (late notice mailing, court order, or county-calendar change). The Texas heightened window runs roughly mid-March through mid-May; California runs roughly May through mid-September; Florida runs from TRIM mailing (usually mid-August) through the 25-day petition deadline.
Texas Tax Code § 41.44 sets the protest deadline as the later of May 15 or 30 days after the notice mails. When a CAD mails late, the 30-day rule applies. We track each county’s notice mailing date during the heightened-review window and update the deadline accordingly.
8. Handling Sensitive Topics
| Topic | How we handle it |
|---|---|
| Address-confidentiality programs | Many states maintain confidentiality programs for domestic-violence survivors, law-enforcement officers, judges, and others; we describe the framework and route to the state coordinator. We do not publish or reproduce protected addresses. |
| Disability and disabled-veteran exemptions | Application requires medical or VA documentation; we describe the process generally and route specific cases to the county and to the VA where applicable |
| Senior / over-65 exemptions and freezes | Eligibility, application, and freeze rules described per state law; we do not advise on retirement or estate planning |
| Disaster property tax relief | FEMA disaster declarations, state disaster-reappraisal frameworks (TX Tax Code § 11.35, CA Misfortune & Calamity reassessment); we describe and route to the agency |
| Mineral interests & royalty disputes | Specialised valuation; we describe framework and route to specialised counsel — we do not opine on specific mineral disputes |
| Tax sale & foreclosure | Procedure described per state law; we strongly route consumers to legal counsel before any tax-sale purchase or sale |
| Domestic-violence and family-protection records | Where county records may include sensitive information (e.g., heir property), we describe the public-records framework and link to the state’s confidentiality program where one exists |
| Heir property & partition | Texas, Mississippi, and other states have heir-property frameworks; we describe and route to legal counsel |
9. Corrections
- Acknowledge within 1 business day. Every correction email gets a human acknowledgement.
- Verify within 7 business days. We re-check against the agency’s own page, re-capture the screenshot, and respond.
- Expedited path for actively-broken contacts. Phone numbers that don’t work and addresses that USPS rejects get a 48-hour target.
- Same-day path during heightened-review windows. In the 60 days before each state’s primary protest deadline, broken-contact reports and deadline-change reports get a same-day target.
- Material corrections are noted. Where a substantive fact has changed (deadline, exemption rule, fee schedule), the page is updated and the next review timestamp is reset.
- We do not retroactively edit history. If a page is materially wrong, we fix the current version and note the correction at the bottom for at least 30 days.
10. Conflicts of Interest
Editorial staff do not hold financial interests in: any state or county tax agency, any property-tax-consultant firm, any property-tax-protest service, any law firm whose practice includes property-tax matters, any title or escrow company, any real estate brokerage, any property-tax software vendor, or any company whose products or services we describe directly. Editorial staff with personal property in a county we cover are recused from editing that county’s page on any matter that could create a personal-interest issue.
11. AI & Automation Policy
We use software tools for spell-check, grammar review, and routine drafting assistance — like most modern publications. However, no editorial fact, contact detail, URL, address, phone number, deadline, exemption rule, or procedure on county-cad.us/ is published from AI without human verification against the originating agency source, including the manual screenshot capture step. Every page passes through human editorial review, including the eight-step verification process described above. We do not auto-generate or auto-publish county pages.
12. Commercial Position
The site is funded by display advertising. The official agency contact always comes first on every page, before any commercial reference. We do not take advertising from:
- Operations claiming to “remove” assessment records or property records outside lawful state-confidentiality programs
- FCRA-prohibited background-check products dressed up as property-research tools
- Any operation marketing as if it were a county or state tax agency
- Property-tax-protest services that misrepresent licensure status (Texas requires licensure under Tex. Occ. Code Ch. 1152 for property tax consultants representing taxpayers)
- Tax-sale “education” programs that promise unrealistic returns or fail to disclose material risks
- Any operation that has been subject to state attorney general consumer-protection enforcement related to property-tax services
13. Editorial Staff & Bylines
county-cad.us/ operates under a unified editorial byline ("county-cad.us/ Editorial") because county guides are produced and reviewed by multiple editors. For specific source attribution on any factual statement, see the page's footnotes or contact us.
Spotted Something Wrong? Tell Us.
Reader-reported corrections are our priority queue. Acknowledge in 1 business day; verify in 7 business days; 48-hour expedited path for actively-broken contacts; same-day path in pre-deadline heightened review windows.
📧 info@county-cad.us