Since 2007, when the Indiana Supreme Court made a commitment to bring modern technology to Indiana’s courts and the clerks who serve them, it has sponsored the development of more than twenty information sharing, custom applications in INcite, the court’s information technology extranet connecting over 20,000 registered users. One of these applications automated the burdensome transmittal of tax warrants.
Prior to this advancement, the Department of Revenue (Department) mailed thousands of tax warrants to circuit court clerks in every county. The clerk manually entered the name of the party, the date, and the amount of the tax warrant into a large judgment book. By law, the tax warrant became a lien on any property owned by the judgment debtor in that county. Once the entry was made in the judgment book, the clerk returned the tax warrant information, with the judgment book and page number, to the Department. The Department then sent $3 to the clerk for every judgment entered in this manner.
The trial court technology staff of the Supreme Court’s Division of State Court Administration (Division) has worked with the Department and clerks to streamline this process. Using INcite, the court developed a software application that totally automated the processing of tax warrants.
Every morning, JTAC downloads the files from a secure site maintained by the Department, inputs them into INcite, and makes them available in each county using the tax warrant application in INcite. INcite generates an electronic judgment book listing all tax warrants. This automated process not only saves countless hours of staff time for clerks, but it assures accuracy and timeliness. Once the tax warrants have been processed in the clerk’s office, INcite sends a file back to the Department, indicating that the tax warrant has been officially entered into the judgment book. The Department then sends $3 to the clerk for each judgment processed.
In the past, interested parties would have to search the cumbersome tax warrant books in each county, looking for entries that may place a lien on an individual’s real property. The heavy books were also expensive, and cost the county as much as $500 per book. Title researchers often had to travel from county to county to search each county’s judgment books, depending on where the individual owned real property.
Related Article
The old paper tax warrant process was discussed in a previous article:
http://indianacourts.us/times/2008/06/electronic-tax-warrant-registry
Daniel Steward, Senior Vice President at John Bethell Title Company emphasized the importance of tax warrant information to the title of real estate and to his business. He explained: “verifying that a property seller or refinance borrower does not have any outstanding Indiana tax warrants that are a lien on real estate is essential to providing a clear title insurance policy. Every search we do includes checking tax warrants. We do the initial search and then update at the time of closing.”
Many clerks have installed public computer terminals in their offices in order to facilitate public access to these records. As part of the new INcite tax warrant application, the Division provided the clerk a user ID and password for the terminal used by the public.
After the clerk logs into INcite and enters the user ID and password, the public may access electronically all the tax warrant information within INcite for that county. When a tax warrant is satisfied at the Department of Revenue, that information is passed through INcite and the record is updated. Members of the public no longer have to comb through the oversized judgment books. Users of INcite may also generate daily, weekly or monthly reports of all tax warrant activity for a specific county.
The Division has taken steps to enhance remote access to tax warrants in INcite and now offers a new online service that allows remote access to the tax warrant application. For a service charge, a user can obtain an individual, secure user account. As part of this service, the Division has modified the software so that users can access tax warrant information from all counties using this INcite application. This means that a user no longer has to enter a separate user ID and password for each county.
The new service started in June and has been well received. Tony Hobert, the General Manager with Indiana Title Searching Services, Inc., had this to say about accessing tax warrant information on-line through INcite:
“I wanted to take a moment and let you know how impressed I am with the new e-Tax Warrant Search Service implemented by your office. For many years state tax warrants have been a lingering issue as each county utilizes its own computer system and/or hard copy filing system with no consistency from county to county and administration to administration.
The new e-Tax Warrant Search Service streamlines the state tax warrants in a straightforward and logical manner. The speed at which the system generates a search is also very impressive as it is even faster than running a search at the terminals in the clerks’ offices in counties that have their own system and an in-house server.”