Man Underpaid Property Tax by $8.41 County Seized Home, Sold It-Kept Profits

Seems like a great case to get that law struck down at least getting the seizure reversed/compensated. Seizing an entire home and pocketing all proceeds of sale over tiny debt seems like a perfect case for the seizure being unreasonable.

I'm no lawyer but this absolutely has to be unconstitutional. A more egregious example of unreasonable search and seizure is difficult to imagine.

Why do we have to take a stab at how much we owe in taxes when it’s known by tax collectors?

A reminder for whoever has rental properties - use your permanent address or a PO Box for all of your mail related to rental property... it’s dangerous to rely on tenants to pass mail to you - they may simply forget.

A neighbor got a call from a local realtor five years ago asking why they were selling the house. They weren’t and discovered that they forgot to pay property taxes for the previous year. They quickly paid the taxes and all was good.<p>On the flip side: a friend buys up many tax lien properties, usually for very little money.

I&#x27;m sure the politicians responsible will campaign that they &quot;stood up to a tax evading landlord.&quot;

And people are surprised with increasing suicide and drug abuse rates in the US... This kind of random and unusually cruel punishment can do anyone in.

I’d rather focus not on the legality of this (which should of course be fixed) but instead the people who played a direct role in this happening. They shouldn’t be able to drop their kids off at school, pick up a coffee at Starbucks, or show their faces at a family holiday without being confronted by the people around them - from now until forever. If I were this guy, telling the truth of what they knowingly did to everyone around them would be my personal mission until the day I die.

There was a man who was pushed too far once, by the local government. He used his free time to build a bulldozer, covered in armor, and do millions in property damage. I&#x27;m not saying he was right or wrong, but there is a serious cost associated with this kind of injustice, and its not entirely unpredictable.

The basic problem with the US legal system is that it operates on the wording of the law rather than the spirit of the law.<p>Unfortunately, making the spirit of the law overrule the wording is subject to even more casual manipulation and corruption.

This topic frequently comes up with the &quot;Zombie Homes&quot; in my NY town. A non-incumbent mayoral candidate actually proposed a 3 month window where the land owner is notified before the city seizes the property, condemns the home, and demolishes it.<p>No one wins in these institution vs. institution battles. The government does not have the agility to act as an intermediary between a public that wants land utilized and property owners who may be a single citizen or a multinational conglomerate. In my opinion, the more I hear about squatters rights, the more it sounds like the only appropriate solution.

My mind silently filled in a missing “MM” after the amount in the title. I had to go back and read it again to clear to my confusion. <i>That</i> is how ridiculous it is.

The title is missing important punctuation (a period after $8.41) that is in the original article; this makes it difficult to parse in a single pass.

am i missing something here? i thought that the county sent you a tax bill for the amount you owed and then you just paid the bill. that&#x27;s how it&#x27;s always been in numerous states that i&#x27;ve lived. heck... i even paid the tax on a credit card so i even got points ;) I then get an emailed receipt so i have a record, but also so i know that the payment went through. i can even refer to my credit card statement if there is ever an issue. also, if you are ever late or owe, the county has always sent numerous and i mean numerous letters saying so.

another entry on the list of why it&#x27;s surprisingly bad to live in the US.

This is the original purpose of property tax.

How about you don&#x27;t owe $8.41, though

When you have to pay fees to be able to hold on to your property, it&#x27;s not your property. You&#x27;re paying the government mafia for the privilege to hold on to what they view as their property. It is extortion and ultimately robbery as in this case.

HoAs are no different with their cancerous rentseeking behavior. Here in TX, they can place a lien on your house if you don&#x27;t pay your dues.

The article conveniently hides the fact that the owner was a slumlord and the residence that the county seized was not owner-occupied and must have been in very bad shape. If something fetches 25 kUSD at auction when Zillow tells you that equivalent properties nearby go for five time that there&#x27;s a good reason.<p>You&#x27;d think that especially other slumlords appreciate when a derelict property is seized and disposed of quickly because the traphouse next door really causes a headache. It&#x27;s the county that implemented the process, someone must have voted for the fast-track process!

The currently linked article is incredibly inciteful, which is to be expected of Reason whenever they cover tax and property issues.<p>Another way to state one of the facts in this case is that the state seized the property of an owner who was delinquent on his tax bill for over 5 years and well aware of it. Once it&#x27;s the state&#x27;s property I don&#x27;t see why they should pay the &quot;profits&quot; back to him or any other prior owner. At that point, the state and the collective taxpayers are already the owners and the money enters the collective fund.<p>By giving away the profit to a previous owner, the argument presented is effectively that the State should be a taxpayer-funded seller&#x27;s agent that works exclusively in the property owner&#x27;s favor rather than working in favor of the taxpayers who actually pay their fair share.

Recognizing that it sounds bad is easy. Figuring out something that would actually be better in the long run for society is hard.<p>Any takers?<p>(Also, the &quot;profit&quot; part is a red herring. There&#x27;s no way the county could have done all of this for less than the proceeds of the sale.)

I&#x27;m gonna play devil&#x27;s advocate and say this is actually not a bad thing.<p>&gt; In each case, the property owners alleged that they were not given sufficient warning about their delinquent taxes. In some cases, that&#x27;s because county officials were mailing notices to unfinished homes or properties without permanent residents. In others, like Rafaeli&#x27;s case, the notices were delivered to tenants who failed to pass along the information to their landlord, mistakenly believing that the county would inform the landlord separately.<p>They were warned. If you ignore the warnings, what else is the county supposed to do? If there&#x27;s no punishment for not paying taxes, nobody would pay taxes. Seizing assets is better then putting someone in jail, because it actually makes taxpayers money and it hurts the people not paying in a fair way.<p>If you don&#x27;t live at a house enough to check the mail and you aren&#x27;t paying property taxes on it, then it&#x27;s actually good for society to give that house to someone who needs it and will pay taxes on it. This type of thing can reduce homelessness.<p>Finally landlords have no excuse for this, they&#x27;re making money off these properties, it&#x27;s similar to not using them. If you&#x27;re gonna be making a profit off of collecting rent I think the least to ask is for you to properly pay your taxes.