It’s still unclear who is responsible for bungled property tax assessments around New Brunswick, even after the province’s auditor general’s examination.

Auditor General Kim MacPherson put Service New Brunswick at the foundation of the province’s property tax blunder in a report released Nov. 23.

“The $64,000 question was not answered,” said U.N.B. political scientist, Don Wright. “Who is responsible for this mess?”

“The senior management team and board of directors of Service New Brunswick failed to assess the significance of this modernization initiative,” said MacPherson. 

MacPherson said a meeting in May 2016, which included Service New Brunswick and Premier Brian Gallant, was clearly important to having "fast-track" technology sped up.

The auditor general said after the meeting the premier's chief-of-staff emailed back and forth with the former CEO of Service New Brunswick.

Now, she says she will not make a final determination about who ordered technology to be implemented in one year instead of three.

Wright says someone should step up and take responsibility for the disorder.

“There's no smoking gun, again, there are some thoughtful recommendations on how we should move forward.”

No one from Service New Brunswick management or the board of directors is giving interviews at this time. In a prepared statement the crown corporation said it would take the report into account going forward.

Kari McBride from the province’s real estate association says she doesn’t feel the auditor general’s report dug deep enough.

McBride says not enough attention has been focused on ensuring the blunder can’t happen again.

“What's wrong with the system is... it's broken and the reason for that is because the acts are antiquated, they haven't been looked at in 50 years and that is both the assessment act and property transfer act,” McBride says.

Although she agrees with the auditor general’s recommendation that creating a brand new crown corporation would be a bad idea, but believes a solution needs to be made.

“We don’t think it does matter whether it’s a separate agency, it only matters that they’re looking at the proper things that can dissect what's wrong now and rebuild it.”

Of the 18,000 appeals that were filed, 80 per cent have been completed with the remainder corrected by early 2018.

With files from CTV Atlantic’s Nick Moore.