news story / By Heidi Walters

I Have A Tax Lien?

After June 30, the county mailed out about 7,500 unsecured property tax bills, representing an unsecured tax roll of $5.1 million, said Strawn. Most people paid on time, by Aug. 31. The ones who didn’t received notices that they’d have a lien placed on them if they didn’t pay. In the end, the county filed about 700 liens — similar to last year, in which 675 liens were filed. This year’s liens amount to about $390,000 in unpaid taxes, Strawn said. And many of these unsecured properties with liens on them, in Humboldt anyway, are boats — hundreds of them, Strawn estimates.

In a handful of cases, a tax bill gets issued erroneously — say, because a person moved to another state, taking their boat with them, but failed to notify the assessor’s office. “And many times it is people that have sold the boat or disposed of it in some way and have not notified the assessor,” Strawn said. “And they feel that ignoring the bill is the best way to solve it, and they don’t find out until some later time that they’ve caused themselves some greater difficulty. ”

But of course there are other reasons for not paying on time, including, for some, the economic downturn.

Once a lien is filed, the county send out another notice. The lien is good for 10 years. And the penalties can rack up. There’s a 10 percent penalty for paying the bill late, plus some other fees. And then there’s a one-and-a-half percent per month penalty on the amount owed — 18 percent a year. “So you can see that within five years they will have more than doubled the amount that they owe,” Strawn said.

Also, the county can indeed seize the delinquent amount owed from your bank account after the first of the year. “Last year we seized about 20 bank accounts,” Strawn said. “And once someone’s bank account is seized, the banks quite often have a substantial charge that makes it even more difficult for people.”

The county can also seize the property itself. But because most of the tax-delinquent unsecured properties are boats, the county tends not to go that route.

“For one thing, for a practical matter, we have no place to store these boats if we were to seize them,” Strawn said.

But probably the worst fallout from an unpaid tax bill is your battered credit, which can mess you up when you try to refinance a home or buy property.

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