The city of Richmond sent out about 6,200 erroneous tax rebate checks this month before officials realized a data processing error had caused the same recipient name to be repeated over and over again.

Richmonders surprised to get a check from the city payable to “Hartshorn Community Council” can throw them out, officials said, and can expect to receive an explanatory letter and corrected check shortly. The dollar amounts listed on the erroneous checks are correct, officials said, and it’s only the payee line that contains an error.

It’s not clear why that particular name was accidentally printed on thousands of checks, but officials have said the faulty checks will be cancelled and no taxpayer information was compromised.

The mistake meant the city will have to cancel and redo almost 10% of the 59,673 checks expected to be mailed to Richmonders as part of a property tax relief plan approved late last year.

“The error was mine,” Jaime Atkinson, the city’s director of revenue administration, told the City Council’s Governmental Operations Committee on Wednesday afternoon. “I own it. I will fix it. It will not happen again.”

The city approved the rebate checks in the final months of former Mayor Levar Stoney’s term to help property owners struggling with rising tax bills due to the rapid increase in Richmond real estate values. The checks were part of the plan Stoney proposed as an alternative to permanently lowering the city’s real estate tax rate by four cents, a proposal introduced last fall by Councilor Reva Trammell (8th District).

Because one-time rebate checks aren’t a regular city process with clearly established protocols, officials explained Wednesday, the data error occurred as information was being moved through a “manual process in Excel.”

“In the process of manipulating the source data, the payee field was incorrectly overridden in a subset of the population,” she said.

A quality control process also didn’t catch the issue before checks started going out in the mail.

“Clearly that quality control review was insufficient,” Atkinson said. “And I’ve taken steps to make sure I have a much more rigorous process going forward.”

In the future, she said, the city will work to automate the process and put better quality controls in place.

City Councilor Sarah Abubaker (4th District) praised Atkinson for her mea culpa.

“This is exactly what I think good culture should look like at City Hall,” said Abubaker, who has said city employees should feel like they can admit honest mistakes instead of trying to hide things or duck accountability.

Councilor Kenya Gibson (3rd District) questioned whether the problem could really be attributed to a single person as opposed to the broader workings of the city Finance Department.

“This is a reflection of a broken system,” Gibson said. “And things are not going to work if it comes down to one person.”

Finance Director Sheila White said the turnover within her department meant that many people who worked on the last tax rebate process in 2022 are no longer at City Hall. She told the council committee she’s continuing to work on creating a culture where employees can “fail forward” and be upfront about mistakes that shouldn’t be fatal to their careers.

“We’re in the middle of a culture shift,” White said.