816 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters. 
cago and Northwestern, Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul and 
Chicago, Burlington and Quincy roads respectively. This 
committee employed Mr. Thomas H. Brown, formerly tax 
commissioner for the city of Milwaukee, to sift the reports of 
the register of deeds in several counties and to ascertain if pos¬ 
sible how far these reports of sales could be made a basis for 
the determination of the ratio of assessed to true value. Mr. 
Brown and his assistants spent several months working with 
the records of sales for the year, going over the data in the of¬ 
fices of the various registers, and rejecting all sales where it 
appeared from the deed that the consideration as recorded did 
not express the true consideration, or where for any 
reason the consideration could not be compared with 
the assessment of the year in which the deed was 
given. The results of these investigations have been 
privately printed in a pamphlet of 190 pages, entitled 
“An analysis of the reports of land sales made by the regis¬ 
ters of deeds to the secretary of state, showing the unreliability 
of these reports as a basis for determining the true value of 
real estate in Wisconsin.” The committee’s conclusions may 
be given briefly as follows: (1) Owing to the fact that in 
so many cases the recorded consideration does not represent the 
actual sale price, no accurate determination of this ratio is pos¬ 
sible from the reports of the registers to the secretary of state. 
(2) By carefully sifting the data and by securing informa¬ 
tion from the parties to the sales, the committee concludes that 
Milwaukee real estate was, in 1902, assessed at about 52 per 
cent of its true value.” 19 
Using the average of the five-year period, Mr. Marston ob¬ 
tained a value of 56 per cent, using the registers’ reports and 
making no attempt to sift data except to throw out such sales 
as were on the face of the record not available. 
In the summer of 1904, the state board of assessment commis¬ 
sioned Professor T. S. Adams to undertake an investigation 
is Subsequent investigations by agents of tbe tax commission have 
brought to light a very considerable number of omissions and inaccu¬ 
racies in Mr. Brown’s work—enough, it would seem, seriously to affect 
the value of his conclusions. 
