{
  "id": "2003-julyaugust-taxes-finding-the-biggest-deadbeats",
  "slug": "2003-julyaugust-taxes-finding-the-biggest-deadbeats",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2003-julyaugust-taxes-finding-the-biggest-deadbeats.html",
  "year": 2003,
  "month": "July/August",
  "monthNum": 7,
  "headline": "TAXES Finding the biggest deadbeats",
  "kicker": "",
  "author_name": "Mark Greenblatt",
  "author_title": "Reporter",
  "affiliation": "WBBH-Fort Myers/Naples",
  "summary": "The article highlights the investigation on tax delinquents in Charlotte County to identify top property tax defaulters, revealing significant uncollected taxes due to inaction by the tax collector's office.",
  "keywords": [
    "taxes",
    "delinquents",
    "Charlotte County"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Business & Economy",
    "Investigative Methods",
    "Government & Politics"
  ],
  "technologies": [
    "Access",
    "CD-ROM",
    "mainframe",
    "ASCII"
  ],
  "full_text": "Our project began with a search for the top 10 tax delinquents in Charlotte County. With government budgets facing some of their tightest years in state history, my television station wanted to know who wasn't paying their fair share of property taxes in southwest Florida. By the end of the reporting, we discovered a much more important story that could potentially help collect millions of dollars in lost revenue for Charlotte County. I began by contacting the Charlotte County tax collector and requesting a complete database of all tax certificates issued to people who hadn't paid their real property taxes in the last seven years. We wanted to know who the delinquents were and how much they owed in taxes and penalties. Within a week of the initial request, I received a comprehensive set of 'deadbeat data' from the tax collector on CD-ROM. Since Charlotte County stores delinquent taxpayer information on a mainframe system, I asked for the data in ASCII. They provided the entire database for free. I imported the text into Microsoft Access 97. Not long after beginning a search through all the records, I discovered my first roadblock. The tax collector kept detailed information on each delinquent, but surprisingly, no one had tallied up how much people owe in back taxes over the years. In fact, I was told no one had ever done a countywide calculation showing how much each delinquent owed in penalties over multiple years. Also, because interest kept adding up, the dollar figure changed every day. But the tax collector's database showed only how much delinquents originally failed to pay. To get an accurate picture of the top tax delinquents, I needed to calculate the back tax information for more than 40,000 records. After talking with the information technology office for the tax collector, I began writing a program in Access to calculate back taxes. To accomplish our task, we had to first calculate how many months had passed since each delinquency began. The more months without a payment, the more in back taxes owed. I created two new fields in Access and ran the calculations to show the number of delinquent months and the monthly interest rate for each delinquent. We used this information to calculate how much each delinquent owed in back taxes, but I still had to add a $4.25 penalty to each record to cover the cost of advertising the delinquency in a local newspaper. After completing the work, we finally thought we had all the information we needed. It didn't take long for us to discover I needed to merge the file with another county database to get an accurate picture of local delinquents. The database of tax certificates showed only the name of the person who owned the property the year its taxes became delinquent. We needed a second database to see the name of the current owner. Florida law states the current owner of property is responsible for all back taxes. I called the property appraiser's office and arranged to receive the electronic list of properties in Charlotte County. I merged the tax collector's information with the property appraiser's list by joining the files using the 'strap number' field that serves as a property identifier. Finally, with information about current property owners in hand, we were able to generate the true list of top tax delinquents. Our queries found that one company had piled up more than $950,000 in back taxes on more than 500 properties. With a quick visit to the county clerk's office, we discovered the county's top tax delinquent was going to have a very difficult time paying its bill. Court records showed the company had gone bankrupt and hadn't paid its taxes for seven years in a row. Despite this fact, the county continued to spend tax dollars sending out delinquent notices and advertising its delinquency in the newspaper year after year. This struck us as odd, since Florida law allows county governments to auction property if the owner remains delinquent for more than two years. For some reason the county was bypassing the option to auction the properties off, a move that could recoup money and return the real estate to the tax rolls. By law, the tax collector must spend tax dollars advertising delinquencies three times a year for each piece of property that qualifies. We began more detailed queries, searching for all the delinquents that hadn't paid for years but were still draining the county's coffers. We calculated the tax collector had spent $251,712 since the mid-1990s trying to collect from deadbeats it could have cracked down on long ago. We eventually uncovered a total of $8.3 million in uncollected taxes across the county since the mid-1990s. It's money that wasn't getting to essential services such as schools, fire departments and road construction crews. More than $1 million of that would have gone to the Charlotte County Fire Department. Fire Chief Dennis DiDio told us it could have added new fire trucks, firefighters and equipment to fight bio-terrorism. Further research revealed Florida law requires county governments to auction off all land worth more than $5,000, if the land has been delinquent for more than two years. If it's worth less than $5,000, counties can decide for themselves if they want to go after the property. The $8.3 million in uncollected revenue we discovered was largely made up of properties worth less than $5,000. We found the county failed to put together all the pieces on its own. It looked only at how much each delinquent owed on individual pieces of land. No one ever thought to keep track of just how much delinquent land existed under one person's name. We eventually discovered systematic proof that the county wouldn't crack down on a majority of delinquents who owned land assessed at $5,000 or less. We took our findings to the tax collector and the real property manager for Charlotte County. The tax collector told us she wanted to immediately respond by auctioning off all the delinquent land we discovered. However, that wasn't her decision to make. The real property manager decides which land to sell at tax auction. When we showed him our findings, he pledged his support for the tax collector's idea. The real property manager told us he would begin the process of auctioning off all the delinquent properties that qualified for the program. The county clerk has agreed to postpone some of its normal fees to speed the sale of the large number of properties that will be auctioned off on the courthouse steps. The Charlotte County tax collector and the real property manager credit WBBH for discovering a potential source of millions of dollars in uncollected revenue. We're told Charlotte County will complete its auctions over the course of the next year.",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "pre-v2",
    "extracted_at": "",
    "verified": true
  },
  "similar": [
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      "slug": "1997-october-analyzing-property-tax",
      "score": 0.304
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  ],
  "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/2003-julyaugust-taxes-finding-the-biggest-deadbeats.html",
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}