Georgia and Illinois switch things up
Effective January 1, 2018, both Georgia and Illinois adopted new legislation and launched statewide databases for housing state tax liens. State tax liens will be limited to those filed by the state Department of Revenue. The Department of Revenue will be able to file these liens electronically, and taxpayers will be able to make online payments. Though guidelines for these databases seem to indicate that all existing liens (currently filed with the county recorder) will be duplicated within these databases, our industry experience reminds us that sometimes these migrations are not executed perfectly resulting in effective liens that do not get picked up by the centralized database. In light of this understanding, Capitol Services will search both the centralized databases and the county recorder for state tax liens in Georgia and Illinois. We also recognize the value of continuing to search the land records for other state liens filed by agencies other than the Department of Revenue, such as city, town, and other municipalities or government agencies levying liens.