Liens a cash cow for Fulton tax chief | www.myajc.com

When the housing crisis was squeezing Atlanta and many homeowners struggled to pay their property taxes, life was getting sweeter for Fulton County’s chief tax collector.

Seizing on a law on the books since the Great Depression, by 2010 Tax Commissioner Arthur Ferdinand had found a way to personally profit from the controversial collection system he set up.

Now, Ferdinand takes a cut every time his office sells a tax debt to a private collection firm or the taxpayer antes up, an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has found. He already was Georgia’s highest-paid elected official, but a 50-cent fee he now gets on each and every paid-off lien has added tens of thousands a dollars a year to his pay.

With the boost, Ferdinand earned $383,000 last year for a job where he started out earning $77,400 in 1997.

Not even county commissioners knew how much he really makes, even though the fees were going into county coffers before they were diverted to Ferdinand’s pocket. He may be Georgia’s only tax commissioner taking that money.

Ferdinand wouldn’t discuss the payments, saying only that they are “permitted by law.” And Fulton County’s lawyers have blessed the arrangement, though they will not explain their reasoning.

Other attorneys, though, are not so sure Ferdinand can legally take both a full salary and a slice of lien proceeds, and they say the arrangement creates a staggering conflict of interest. The tax commissioner, critics say, now has a profit motive to hurl more taxpayers into a system that can put them at risk of losing their homes over small debts.

No other tax commissioner in Georgia sells so many tax liens to private debt collectors. With each sale, Ferdinand hears cha-ching!

via Liens a cash cow for Fulton tax chief | www.myajc.com.