Lowndes County tax collector Greg Andrews had some good news for supervisors at Monday’s board meeting: Property tax collections for 2018 came in at 98.5 percent and even more revenue could be on the way.
“That’s a pretty good rate,” Andrews said. “That means out of about $72 million, we haven’t collected only about $295,000. On top of that, the company y’all have hired to start collecting back taxes for the past seven years for personal property that can’t be sold at a tax auction starts on Nov. 8.”
Andrews said tax notices for 2019 will go out on Nov. 8.
“We had a millage decrease for both the county and county schools, so the taxes should reflect that,” he said.
Andrews said that someone with $100,000 in property would see about a $10 reduction in their taxes compared to the previous year.
“Things have gone pretty good,” Andrews said later. “The collections is about as good as you’ll see. Usually, you budget based on collection about 92 or 93 percent, so it’s well above normal this year.”
Andrews said he is also excited to see what uncollected taxes the county will recover after signing on with American Financial Credit Services, an Indiana-based collection agency.
AFCS was founded in 1993 to collect unpaid medical bills, but converted to county tax collections in 2000. It now focuses solely on that work. The company has recovered $100 million in unpaid county taxes in Indiana over the past two decades and now has 76 counties in Indiana and 24 counties in South Carolina as clients.
Lowndes, Lee and Neshoba counties have hired AFCS to collect back taxes, the first counties in Mississippi to sign with the company.
“We’re excited to be in Mississippi,” said Dean Strange, a vice president with the company. “The tax codes are almost perfect for the work we do because they allow us to go back and collect taxes for seven years, which is a bigger window than some states.”
AFCS provides its service at no cost to the county. Its revenue comes from fees added to the taxpayer’s bill.
“They’re able to do some things we can’t in trying to get these back taxes,” Andrews said. “For us, there’s about $300,000 we can’t collect each year, so if you calculate that over seven years, you’re looking at about $2 million. How much we’ll be able to get, I don’t know. But whatever we get, will be more than we would be getting otherwise. It’s a good deal for the county.”
Strange said the work his company does is really an extension of county tax collector offices.
“Most of these counties just don’t have the staff to do this work,” he said. “It’s a lot of work, especially for tax offices that may have only a few employees. They have other duties to fulfill, but our company has the manpower dedicated to this one thing. It’s proven to be successful for the counties and for our company, too.”
Slim Smith is a columnist and feature writer for The Dispatch. His email address is [email protected].
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