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WhyImNotDoingWork OP t1_jaa82c1 wrote

This is in wolcott. Our town clerk claims to never have received any of the taxes that were paid from escrow this year for almost half the year. The town raked in fees from the escrows accounts. As one of the people who was affected by this I spent a lot of time on the phone with the escrow company and they thought this was strange. The town clerk has acted as though this is normal. The town report this year says otherwise.

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CriscoCrispy t1_jaast3h wrote

So, if the clerk is claiming not to have received any of the taxes from escrow for the entire year, wouldn’t that mean multiple mortgage lenders just happened to screw up the escrow payments on all the mortgages that happened to be in your town? If I’m understanding you correctly, that seems highly unlikely.

When you say the town “raked in fees from the escrow accounts”, are you saying that the town clerk collected late fees from all of the lenders for properties in your town for nearly 6 months of late payments? Again, this seems highly suspect.

As a town resident you should have a right to question this and the town auditor should definitely be looking into it (although if it’s like our town, audits take months to happen. 2021 audits just happened in January of 2023).

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mobert_roses t1_jaal63j wrote

Have you compared this against annual reports from previous years?

Just based on this document, the amount of outstanding delinquent taxes at the end of the year looks high, but not that much higher than the previous year. Looks like there was about $7,850 in delinquent 2020-2021 taxes still outstanding at the end of 2021. Not that far off from $10,300.

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WhyImNotDoingWork OP t1_jaaljf8 wrote

Yea you can see from other years this is not normal. The amount reported delinquent this year was really high. They collected it eventually, as shown in this chart.

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mobert_roses t1_jaanzmk wrote

This is not showing all time delinquent taxes for each year, but:

In the first column, amount of taxes still due from the indicated tax year after their due date as of Jan. 1st, 2022.

In the second column, amount of delinquent taxes for the indicated tax year collected in calendar year 2022.

In the third column, amount of delinquent taxes still due for the indicated tax year as of Dec. 31st, 2022.

This is a very poorly designed table, and I understand your confusion. Also, I work in municipal finance, and I appreciate you doing your due diligence to hold your public officials to account. G-d knows my exposure to crappy graphics is the only reason I have an inkling of what is going on here, lol.

I would encourage you to dig up town reports from the last 5 years and compare the data in them. I hope you will find that this is not astronomically high, but who knows. It does look at least a little high. No clerk worth his or her salt is going to begrudge you looking into town finances.

One other thing: at the office where I work, we do not go tracking down escrow payments that don’t show up on time, because it is not strictly our responsibility to keep track of which tax accounts are being paid through escrow. I would have a stern conversation with your lender and consider asking Wolcott’s delinquent tax collector if some of the fees on your tax bill could be waived given that you thought it was being paid by escrow.

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WhyImNotDoingWork OP t1_jaaseeu wrote

The fees are all paid by the escrow company. All escrow payments are all grouped together and sent to the town as one payment. The town claims they never received that payment, which represents the large amount that was not collected and then was. The town collected a bunch of fees from the escrow company. Seemingly no harm to people in the town, but still fishy. Everything was paid eventually and never cost me more. Just seems really weird and convenient for the town this all happened.

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mobert_roses t1_jaat7ts wrote

Interesting. I’ve admittedly never been asked to handle escrow payments, but I’m gonna ask my coworkers about them tomorrow. To be clear, I don’t work in Wolcott, but in one of the state’s larger municipalities.

I would still encourage you to look at previous years’ reports, even if a city employee told you that. Sometimes city employees should be directing questions to the appropriate coworker rather than trying to answer them themselves, if that makes sense.

Your Clerk’s office should have copies of every recent annual report.

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CriscoCrispy t1_jaaqm8d wrote

It looks to me as if outstanding taxes for 2020-21 were $1,859 and for ‘21-22 they were $10,325. That’s certainly a big difference from ‘20-21 as well as the prior 2 years! This is definitely concerning. Something odd is going on.

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alemap1969 t1_jaatqdz wrote

It isn't odd at all. Some of the delinquent taxes have been paid off in prior years. $10,325 in delinquent for the most recent taxes year, based on 3 mil collected is very reasonable

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CriscoCrispy t1_jabbutb wrote

Maybe I’m looking at it wrong, but it seems to me that the $ outstanding in each row is for each fiscal year, not a running total. The total outstanding delinquent for all 4 years is indicated at the bottom: $15,676. So the outstanding delinquent $ for ‘21-‘22 is around 5x what it was each of the previous 3 years, isn’t it? That doesn’t seem odd?

As for “based on 3 mil collected”, I would imagine that the total amount of taxes levied by the town didn’t change drastically from prior years.

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71802VT t1_jacn8bl wrote

Based on the two towns I've paid taxes in for the last 20+ years, I don't think it's odd. The delinquent tax amount varies a lot from year to year. Fun fact, and maybe this still happens, we used to print the names of everyone who owed and how much.

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Real-Pierre-Delecto2 t1_jadg2fn wrote

> we used to print the names

Still do in my town. Fucked up thing is some who are on that list are filthy rich and even a few large corps as well.

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mobert_roses t1_jaaqv47 wrote

That is delinquent taxes for those years that were STILL outstanding as of Dec. 31st, 2022.

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Azr431 t1_jaawu4s wrote

Is your username some kind of homage to Robert Moses, the infamous shitstain on urban development?

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RoyalAntelope9948 t1_jaca29f wrote

Something is rotten in Denmark or in this case, Wolcott. Multiple mortgage companies would have to have the same problem in not issuing payments. And since when does a town collect fees from an escrow account? That's nuts.

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