06-F Tax Proposal - McCreary - Laserfiche WebLink

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F. FILING AND PROSECUTING LAWSUITS TO JUDGMENT It is necessary to file lawsuits against those delinquent property owners who do not respond to our notices of delinquency. MVBA takes the initiative to identify delinquent property owners for lawsuits, consults with the client and/or tax office, files lawsuits, and pursues the lawsuits to payment or judgment and sale. While we regularly consult with the tax office and respond to the suggestions of our clients, MVBA does not wait for our clients to tell us upon which delinquent property owners to file lawsuits. MVBA files lawsuits regularly and continuously. The following is a description of our standard litigation process. However, we adapt our process to meet our clients' desires and policies. SELECTION OF ACCOUNTS FOR LAWSUITS MVBA uses specially-designed computer programs to sort the accounts on the delinquent tax roll by various characteristics such as the amount due and the number of tax years delinquent. Accordingly, we file lawsuits on tax accounts with large amounts due and on those tax accounts where the amount is smaller but where a number of years are delinquent. This provides a representative cross section of the property owners on the delinquent tax roll and avoids undue concentration on a group of property owners or a specific area of the county. We carefully identify those property owners who have legitimate economic or medical hardships or those who have filed over age 65 tax deferrals. However, MVBA scrupulously avoids any other discriminatory criteria in selecting accounts for lawsuit. CONSOLIDATION OF TAX ACCOUNTS UNDER COMMON OWNERSHIP The policy of MVBA is to file a single lawsuit encompassing all the delinquent properties, both real and personal, with common ownership. This is accomplished by use of an alpha- cross index computer program which identifies all accounts on the delinquent tax roll under the same name. We also inquire of the tax office to identify name variations or the business names of a delinquent property owner. Combining all the delinquent accounts of a property owner in a single lawsuit makes it easier to collect the total tax liability of the property owner, reduces the amount of court costs charged to the delinquent property owner, and eliminates confusion and duplication of efforts which can result if multiple suits are filed against the same person. After the account selection process, title and address research is performed on all parties to the lawsuit. Upon completion of this research, the MVBA computer system combines the delinquent tax roll data on the tax amounts, the tax years due, and the description of the property taxed with our research information on title to the property and the addresses of the property McCreary, Veselka, Bragg & Allen 19