Overdue taxes may be written off
According to County Executive John Pelham, this is a situation where delinquent taxpayers may not be at fault.
‘Since no effort was made to collect them, they may not have been aware of it,’ Pelham said.
Since the county cannot legally collect tax bills after 10 years Pelham says the county has no choice but to write them off.
‘So we’re basically looking at an amended docket Monday night at the commission meeting with a resolution giving our County Trustee, Darlene Bryant, the ability to write these off that are over 10 years old and that have not been turned over for collection,’ Pelham said, ‘in order to get them off her books.
‘Her hands are tied,’ Pelham added. ‘There’s nothing she can do at this point. Since over 10 years has passed, legally there’s nothing we can do.’
Bryant discovered the discrepancy when her office’s computer system began reporting the back taxes as taxpayers were paying their current taxes.
Bryant then notified state auditors and ran a report that showed 85 past due tax bills from businesses and individuals going back over 10 years, with some taxpayers having multiple past due amounts. Some of the bills were from what were subsequently found to be bankruptcies.
‘When we had taxpayers start coming in to the office to pay their taxes, we had one gentleman come in to pay his property tax,’ Bryant said. ‘And when we pull it up on our computer screens it will say if there’s back taxes owed, and there was back taxes owed. So we scrolled down our screen and found it was in 1989.’
When informed of this, the taxpayer maintained he had not been notified.
‘We told him you have taxes owed from 1989,’ Bryant said. ‘And he was really surprised. He said, ‘I’ve never been told this before. I don’t think I owe it.’ I think we had two or three people that happened to in 1989 and ’90. So we started digging through our books to try to figure out what was wrong.’
Bryant says she has been told it was the 1989-90 timeframe when the office first became computerized, and feels that may have been part of the problem. But in any case, she felt she was required to inform county government of the situation.
As to why these overdue bills weren’t discovered previously, Bryant says it’s possible the system just didn’t pick up on them before she came into office. Bryant’s office still has employees who were there during the previous administration and they don’t recall this coming up before. Since there are periodic updates to the computer system, Bryant feels it may be possible the computer system only recently began showing these past due taxes.
One bright spot is the fact that over $9,000 of the almost $29,000 total taxes reported were from 1999-2002 and can still be collected. These overdue taxes will be turned over to the Clerk and Master for collection this year.
Though individuals who owe back taxes may eventually have their names published, county officials can’t be sure these individuals were ever informed of their delinquent taxes, since no effort was ever made to try to collect them, so there are no current plans to publish the names.