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Seward County officials report progress and technical hurdles on tax sales, collections
Summary
County staff updated commissioners on personal-property collection efforts, pending real-property tax lien foreclosures, and data-conversion issues that delayed earlier tax-sale work. Officials said they expect targeted fixes within about 30 days and will report back at the next meeting.
Nathan Foreman, a staff member, gave commissioners an update on Seward County’s tax collection efforts, saying the work spans three areas: personal-property tax collections, real-property tax-lien foreclosures handled by outside counsel, and future tax-sale preparations.
Foreman said the county has been working to coordinate data with an outside collection firm on personal-property accounts and that a meeting between the treasurer’s office and the collector occurred the same day; he said he had not yet received a full report from that meeting. “I plan on the next meeting letting you all know what’s happened there,” Foreman said.
On real-property foreclosures, Foreman said outside counsel is still waiting for title work needed to file amended petitions. He added the county is exploring whether to add several “straggler” parcels to existing proceedings and that a revised journal entry with detailed service information is circulating among involved attorneys. Foreman said he had tentative approval from most attorneys and was awaiting responses from two remaining counsel. He also said he had identified and will seek appointment of a new guardian ad litem after the previous appointee moved away.
Mary Rose, a staff member in the treasurer’s office, described problems with the county’s tax software conversion (CIC) that have left payments and tax-sale records misaligned. She explained that the October data pull initially provided to the collection firm lacked required fields and that some earlier tax-sale payments did not transfer correctly from the old system into the new one. Rose said the county must reconcile historical payment line items and manually re-enter some payment records so parcels will appear correctly for future sales. She said her office has begun the process and hopes most fixes will be in place within “the next 30 days.”
Rose outlined the technical steps: pulling tax-year-specific data, separating penalties and fees from principal amounts, and repairing a conversion gap that left earlier tax-sale payments out of the new database. She said the county will prioritize 2023 data and move backward as needed, while working with CIC programming for items that require vendor support.
Commissioners did not take formal action on the update; staff said they would return with a status report at the next meeting that will indicate whether the county has submitted a journal entry to the judge, added parcels to petitions, or completed the data fixes needed for the next tax sale.
