CROWN POINT | Lake County officials always see double when checking their records for erroneous property-tax exemptions.

And it could be costing the county millions.

"We find at least a hundred of them a week," Lake County Auditor Peggy Holinga Katona said Friday, referring to homeowners who improperly receive homestead exemptions for more than one property. "I have tightened it up. If it's wrong, it's wrong. We take it off."

Homestead exemptions are a way of giving a break and currying favor with Hoosier householders and their families. It can represent an annual tax reduction of hundreds of dollars depending on local property values and tax rates.

It's a break 235,000 property owners currently take advantage of, and Katona said her office will likely process another 50,000 homestead exemptions by the end of the year.

But state law limits property owners to only one homestead credit on their primary place of residence. Otherwise, exemptions would multiply, and a shrinking base of taxpayers would shoulder the burden of financing local services.

It is Katona's responsibility to administer this unruly thicket.

She said she and her employees are constantly running duplicate name and address searches and fielding tips from outraged residents who think their neighbors are tax cheats.

St. John Township Assessor Hank Adams said his staff recently found 20 duplicates in a random search that together could cost the county $700,000 alone.

"I turned them over to the auditor's office," Adams said. "Peggy is doing a better job of eliminating those than has been in the past."

Adams said sometimes tips come to him from an unlikely source.

"I remember one woman who called to complain about the assessment on a new property she bought," Adams said. "She was so abusive to me that I checked into her records and found she had a dozen or more homestead credits on properties she owned around the county. So I made sure those were removed. I never heard from her again."

Dan Repay, tax director for Katona, said many of the problems arise when homes are sold and the old, invalid exemptions remain on the records.

Repay said the office cannot get too zealous about removing suspicious exemptions because different people sharing the same name can both be eligible for exemptions or owners can properly have duplicate exemptions in cases involving homes sold under contract.

"You have to check it many ways because if you take the wrong one off, you will end with taking off an exemption of some 80-year-old person," Repay said. "We send letters to them giving them about a month's notice, and we can go back three years to correct situations where the owners had forgotten to file a homestead or it was erroneously taken off."