Thanks for clarifying

People paying at the last minute each year shouldn’t make the outstanding amount for the last fiscal year suddenly 5x higher than it was each of the prior 3 fiscal years.

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.

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).

This quote is referring to how town officials are spending collected taxes, not how the tax collector is handling the collections & bookkeeping. Nevertheless, this situation absolutely warrants having an auditor look at.

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.

This is exactly what I have…an old pair of Mucks with Yaktrax spikes that stay on them. Easy to slip on and off every time the dog insists on going out.

Very Vermont!