How to Find Out About County Tax Lien Filings
You may find it hard to get information online about county tax lien filings. That’s because there is no one place, especially online, where all counties in the different states report their county tax lien information to. Additionally, most counties don’t display their county tax lien information themselves, but rather send it in to the either the federal or state offices depending on the type of lien it is.
If you can’t find the information that you’re looking for regarding a specific county tax lien, you could try to find the information by looking up the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) filings for that area. In many cases, UCC filings will contain the information you need on a county tax lien. UCCs are centrally filed at the State level, in most cases at the Secretary of State office. This began in July 2001 to eliminate dual filing at both the federal and state level, which had been happening about 20% of the time with county tax liens.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a universal system for displaying information about a county tax lien. How easy the information is to find depends on what your state has chosen to do. Many states, including Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington all offer online UCC/county tax lien searches.
In many cases, the states use the UCC system for federal tax liens, but not always. If you need information about both personal and corporate county tax liens, you need to make sure that each state database differentiates clearly between the two.
A tax service can sometimes help you find out information about a county tax lien. Check out the Tax Defense Network. They specialize in a variety of tax matters, and can help you track down information about the county tax lien you were interested in, if you can’t find the information online yourself.
