I THINK I figured out one ofthe problems the Board of Revision of Taxes is having lately: It has no head.

If you imagine a headless torso stumbling around, I think you get the picture. If you need help, conjure up Washington Irving's "Legend of Sleepy Hollow."

The missing "head" is executive director Enrico Foglia, who just retired. In what appears to have been a Horatio Alger story, Foglia, a longtime committeeman with ties to Democratic City Committee Chairman Bob Brady, started in 1972 as a clerk and rose to oversee 200 BRT employees. He had only a high-school diploma, wasn't qualified to assess property, yet raked in nearly 100Gs a year.

I always told my kids, "Finish high school and the sky's the limit. (Also arrange to be thisclose to a political heavyweight.)" I also told them to marry rich, but did they listen? No!

Headless or not, the BRT is only the second-most-hated agency in the city, trailing the loathed Philadelphia Parking Authority.

The PPA leads the Headless Horseman because PPA has officers in snappy uniforms blanketing the city to seize on momentary indiscretions of any driver - be it a cabbie discharging a passenger in a no-stopping zone, a truck stopping to make a delivery or the tail of my car eight inches into a crosswalk while I make a stop of no more than four minutes with my flashers on. Sorry to get personal.

The BRT doesn't have nefarious agents out pounding the sidewalks looking for trouble.

Maybe it should. See, in addition to screwing up the re-evaluation of the city's 25,000 commercial plots, according to the Inquirer, it clean lost 6,000 of them. Vanished in plain sight. I recommend a search party starting in Area 51.

For many of those not lost, it was bad. A guy who owns a lot and beat-up warehouse in a neighborhood where the most prosperous business is a meth lab, his property was found to be worth $3.9 million, more than the value of property around Rittenhouse Square. His previous assessment was a piddling $216,000.

The Inquirer documented many such cases and in previous dispatches showed that the BRT had vacant lots listed as occupied, parking lots listed as town houses, and town houses listed as, I don't know, hay stacks. Haven't they heard of Google Earth?

Did I mention that the screwups are wrapped in the new, improved Actual Valuation Initiative?

The BRT's acting chief assessor, Barry Mescolotto, acknowledged some flaws in the system, but saw the new numbers as "a starting point." I can understand a few glitches in a new system, but the Inquirer said that "hundreds of other missteps litter the AVI numbers."

Some junk properties carry Tiffany price tags. Some crown jewels are priced like the markdown shelf at Acme.

Rhyme? None. Reason? None. Accuracy? Spotty.

Now, a city task force will soon offer four options to fix the BRT, ranging from mild (rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic), to drastic (sinking it like the Titanic and building something new).

If they take the blow-it-up-and-start-again approach, how long will that take? How certain are we that a city that can't get police radios to work properly will come up with a reliable, equitable method of property-tax assessments?

Lurking in the background is the report, due Oct. 15, from the Mayor's Task Force on Tax Policy and Economic Competitiveness, which is expected to recommend shifting taxes from payroll to property. That would first require accurate real-estate assessments. We are so screwed.

E-mail stubyko@phillynews.com or call 215-854-5977. For recent columns:

http://go.philly.com/byko.