Risk Management Blog

Federal tax liens are regularly filed at county filing offices across the country, so your account monitoring process should include those jurisdictions. In our experience, we see many federal tax liens being filed at the county instead of the state filing office. A federal tax lien, whether filed at the state or the county, may affect your priority position; therefore it is critical to keep an eye on lien-holder activity at both the state and county level. Many creditors consider federal tax liens the most urgent of all liens because they can prime a perfected UCC.

Many lien monitoring programs only report on state-level data, which means you could be missing an important filing in a county jurisdiction. The fees for these state-level only monitoring programs make them attractive to lien searchers on a budget, but it is important to be aware of the risks and potential costs of missing a county filing.

When evaluating lien monitoring programs, it is important to recognize that only a portion of states maintain federal tax lien records at the state level filing office and of those, an ever smaller portion include federal tax lien records for individual debtors. In these jurisdictions, only a search of the county index will uncover federal tax liens against an individual debtor.

Click here to check out our previous post on federal tax liens. First Corporate Solutions’ Account Monitoring program includes expert searches of both the state and county filing office records for your complete coverage and peace of mind. Contact us today at 800.406.1577 or visit our website here for more information.