Delinquent taxpayers being sued by county attorney

If some delinquent property taxpayers don’t pay up on their back taxes, then by early next year the property may start being auctioned off on the courthouse steps.
Whitley County Attorney Paul Winchester said he has recently filed about eight lawsuits against delinquent taxpayers in circuit court, and that more are coming.
“We have been working on this for some time but hadn’t filed anything until now because of the amount of time it takes to prepare these,” Winchester said. “We are going down the tax rolls starting with the A’s, and have actually been filing suits on the delinquencies. We decided to start at the A’s, and work our way down.”
Efforts to file the lawsuits have been underway for months since the lawsuits take quite a bit of time to prepare, because a title search has to be done on each piece of property in order to determine who the current owner is, and if anyone else has other liens on the property, Winchester said.
“We are into the cycle now. My plan is to file some weekly, and work our way down. This kind of forces the issue on some of these,” he said adding that it may take years to get around to all the delinquent taxpayers.
Winchester said he has been sending out notices for some time, and has gotten some response from people willing to go ahead and pay.
“With the lawsuits, you kind of force the issue,” he said.
The county attorney’s office is researching delinquent property tax bills are far back as 1996, and will file suit against people, who haven’t paid their taxes over the last 10 or 11 years through 2004. The lawsuits are seeking payment of all past delinquent property taxes, in addition to interest and penalties on all prior years.
“For some people, it will be a significant amount,” Winchester said. “We have run into some that owe all the way back from 1996 up through 2004.”
Winchester said that he is not sure of the exact amount of money this will generate for the county, but that it will be a significant amount of money for the county.
He said the ultimate relief would be to petition the court to sell the property in order to pay the tax bills. The master commissioner would then sell the property at auction on the courthouse steps.
How long will it be before this happens? If other arrangements aren’t made, this could start by early January, Winchester said. The county filed suit against four delinquent property owners Monday. Those owners have 20 days to file an answer to the complaint.
“If they don’t answer it, then I can move for a default, and proceed fairly quickly,” Winchester said. “I am hoping that most people will want pay the bills rather than having the sale. If they don’t, on the fast track you are looking at three months or so from the time of initiating the lawsuit until the time to ask the court to actually have a sale. Then it would depend on the master commissioner’s schedule.”
Winchester said he is hoping that once delinquent taxpayers learn the county is filing lawsuits, many will go ahead and start paying the taxes.
“Hopefully, after we do a few, people won’t wait until they actually have a suit filed against them. They will go ahead and pay it,” Winchester said.
Winchester said that another thing, which has come of this, is that the county has run across a few people listed on the delinquent tax rolls, who shouldn’t be there, so their names can be taken off.
“When we have done the title search to find out who the owner is, we have found some that actually shouldn’t be on there because somebody else owns it. On one piece of property that we found, both the prior owner, and the new owner were both listed. Now we have one of them off. It is going to tidy up the tax rolls, and get it where it should be,” he noted.