M. Night Shyamalan wowed us with his breakthrough film, "The Sixth Sense". This may be the only time one of his films has wowed us but I’ll leave that topic for another day. "Sense" rejuvenated the suspense thriller without the gore and violence that is typically used in such flicks. In this intense story, Dr. Malcom Crowe (played by Bruce Willis) is a child psychologist whose new patient, Cole Sear (played by Haley Joel Osment) sees dead people and is constantly terrified by what he sees. The whole movie plays off the reality of Malcolm trying to help Cole with his perception of having these sightings. Reality is flipped upside down in the surprise ending where Malcolm realizes that his "reality" was just a perception - Malcolm is actually dead (sorry if I ruined the ending for you). It was Cole who helped him get to this realization – as he says in the movie, "Dead people only see what they want to see".
I remember watching this film on an airplane. Never in my 20+ years of travel have I encountered so much conversation around an airplane movie than for "The Sixth Sense". Everyone was talking to their neighbors and in the lines for the bathroom. This concept of only seeing what we want to see and letting our perceptions overshadow reality resonates with us. It resonates in the property tax industry as well. In the PropTax™ Assessment results we found property tax managers (with 11+ years experience on average) felt very positive about the following statement, "Our tax team regularly evaluates and uses all applicable depreciation tables, seeking to accelerate depreciation wherever possible". Participants in the PropTax Assessment who labeled themselves as "Individual Contributors" (with 0-2 years experience) felt the opposite, that this was rarely done. This made for an interesting and lively discussion at breakout sessions during the most recent IPT Annual Conference, especially since we agreed that the individual contributors were actually filing most of the returns.
It turns out that the "reality" of the experienced property tax managers is not always what it seems. We discussed several reasons for this but they all seemed to focus on a shortage of time. With the pressure of filing returns on time, evaluation and implementation of accelerated depreciation tables for property taxes is not being done on a regular basis. Accelerating depreciation reduces property tax values which in turn reduces property tax liabilities. One medical leasing company I know of reduced their overall property tax liability $1.3 million in large part by focusing on the lives and appropriate depreciation tables for their assets. How much is your company leaving on the table? Is your perception reality?