Fulton County Tax Commissioner Arthur Ferdinand says his system of selling property tax liens to collections firms doesn't unfairly target the Southside’s poor, but he refuses to hand over the records to prove it.
The county has resisted The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's efforts to obtain the data for more than a year, and now Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers, who might have the political muscle to clamp down on the controversial practice, is experiencing the same difficulty in gaining information.
In Fulton, delinquent taxes of as little as $50 can be sold to private companies that tack on monthly interest charges and sell houses at auction to collect accrued debt. In several articles last year, the AJC described how property owners, because of failings in the system, didn't know they owed overdue taxes until their homes were in foreclosure and they owed thousands of dollars to settle.
The issue is critical in Fulton because, while hapless homeowners may suffer, the county has been reluctant to make changes because the system helps Ferdinand collect more than 95 percent of taxes each year, keeping revenue flowing for libraries, the criminal justice system, social programs and other services for nearly 1 million people.
The county's paid lobbyists have been instructed to push back if Rogers proposes changes that would slow collection of delinquent taxes.
No other county relies on the sale of tax liens as much as Fulton. Most Georgia counties and 30 states bar the practice because of its potential to victimize taxpayers.
Rogers, a Republican from Woodstock, is pushing measures to restrict lien sales as part of his effort to overhaul tax collection and appeals processes across the state, and he says he suspects low-income minority residents are being disproportionately ensnared in Fulton's system. A legislative study he ordered last year found that of 89 neighborhoods being grossly overtaxed, 88 are south of I-20.
"What we don't want to have is what some might call selective prosecution," Rogers said.
Ferdinand, who declined to comment for this story, has in the past told the AJC: "Liens are sold all over the county, north and south. It's pretty well distributed."
Rogers filed an open records request for data showing which Fulton properties had liens sold, and for how much, from 2000 to 2010. The county attorney's office responded that the tax commissioner has no such documents, which Rogers questions considering the commissioner's website contains the information.
"Perhaps there are people in the office who don't know what other people in the office are doing," Rogers said. "They need to get their story straight."
County Attorney David Ware referred to his office's response letter to Rogers, which offered him access to Sheriff's Office records of tax liens. Those records, however, show properties slated for auction and don't reflect all tax liens sold.
For more than a year, the AJC has sought access to the tax commissioner's tax bill database, which includes lien sales. The county contends that the database could contain property records of judges, police officers, teachers and other government employees, and so their addresses and Social Security numbers would have to be redacted, costing the newspaper $16.2 million in labor and printing costs. The database, however, does not indicate the occupation of property owners.
The county has also claimed the data would reveal proprietary information about Tyler Technologies Inc., the company that sold the software. DeKalb County contracts with the same company and provided its database to the AJC within days at no cost.
"It seems far-fetched to me that there would be any significant cost for redaction," Georgia Press Association counsel David Hudson said in an email. "The fact that you got the DeKalb County information without any Social Security numbers indicates that a few keystrokes may be all that is required to delete those data fields."
Staff writer M.B. Pell contributed to this article.
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