Anson County is preparing to garnish wages from more than 20 percent of its employees who owe delinquent taxes, and will soon extend the process to others in the county with unpaid taxes.
Seventy-nine employees, or 20.85 percent of county employees, owe delinquent taxes, Rita James, county director of information technologies, told the commissioners during their meeting on Tuesday.
The 79 employees affected by the garnishment owe a total of 109 delinquent tax bills. Forty-seven employees owe on a total of 69 delinquent vehicle tax bills that total $4,817.91. There are 40 real property delinquent tax bills belonging to 32 employees that total $11,015.11.
The total $15,833.02 owed by county employees makes up 0.58 percent of the county’s total delinquent taxes from prior years. Including both real property and vehicle taxes, the total amount of county delinquent taxes owed for the 10 years before 2014 is nearly $2.7 million, according to county finance officer Tiffany Randall. The amount of total taxes owed for 2014 is $1.1 million.
A question of whether the garnishment software worked led James to try it for herself. In addition to updating the system’s list of employees, she found that the garnishment aspect performs perfectly. The employees will have two weeks to pay the delinquent taxes before the garnishment process will begin, she said.
During the meeting, she showed the commissioners the thick stack of garnishment notices that were ready to be mailed. When she held up the pile, Commissioner Vancine Sturdivant was shocked when James said the 109 bills belonged only to county employees. “Are you serious? They have not paid their taxes?” Sturdivant said.
In a separate interview, Commission Chair Anna Baucom said the fact that county employees owe so many taxes is not shocking. “County salaries are not exorbitant, and our pay has not kept pace with the private sector,” she said. “No, I’m not surprised. I’m sorry about it.”
Baucom said that while she feels for those who cannot pay their taxes, the county needs the money to continue offering its services. “It’s tough times in Anson County,” she said. “I don’t want to be the one putting little old ladies and gentlemen out of their homes. I knew a 90-year-old who had bought his house for $5,000 50 years before, and when he died it was worth $40,000 or $50,000, and his tax burden had increased tremendously. We need to be understanding about that, but we also need to collect the taxes.”
The county can extend the garnishment process to include anyone in the county who owes delinquent taxes. “You’d be surprised how many we could garnish if we could just get the employee list from the school system, from the Department of Corrections, from Hornwood, our large employers,” she said.
Baucom said that James will likely train someone to use the garnishment software to continue collecting delinquent taxes soon, and has asked for a plan after the budget planning season is over. “We’re very emphatic about getting our tax collection rate up,” she said. “If you lived in any other county, this would be happening, too.”
The county had several positions it was unable to fill, equipment it could not buy, and requests it could not fund with its FY 15-16 budget. If the delinquent taxes were collected, Baucom said it would make a significant impact on the county’s budget. “We’d make sure that any outstanding loans we could pay off were taken care of,” she said. “We should take care of that first to free up our cash flow. We’re not heavily in debt, but we could bring that down. We don’t have the huge debt that other counties do, but we could certainly take care of some of that and invest it. It would make a big difference.”
The commissioners would likely approve more funding requests, too. “This budget season has been really, really difficult,” Baucom said. “I think the first thing we’d do is put more into education. We have some repairs and maintenance that we have deferred, like this year, our employees are not getting a raise this year. None of us are. We started out with insurance, our insurance for employees had gone up substantially, and we got that whittled down to where its manageable. It has been a very difficult budget season.”
North Carolina general statutes allow the N.C. Department of Revenue to garnish no more than 10 percent of employees’ wages garnished in order to pay debts, according to its website.
Employers can be ordered to garnish their employees’ wages for taxes, student loans, child support, alimony and for ambulance services in some counties. The general statutes prevent the DOR from garnishing wages for personal debt including personal loans or credit card debt, according to the N.C. Department of Labor. It does not fully protect employees from garnishment if the debt was procured somewhere else: “While the North Carolina courts are not permitted to garnish wages based on these debts, creditors in other states may be able to get an order of garnishment under their own states’ laws,” the Department of Labor’s website reads.
Baucom encouraged those who cannot pay their taxes to visit county tax collector Joe Dutton to work out a payment plan. While there may be penalties for extending the payments, Baucom said it is a step in the right direction. “Another piece of this thing is that if I owed taxes on my home, on my property, and I didn’t have enough money, I’d go in and talk to them and let them know I can’t pay this all right now, but I can make monthly payments,” she said. “There are penalties, but that way you’re making progress.”
To begin the process, citizens can visit Dutton. “You can come in and talk with the collector and make themselves available,” Baucom said. “Our tax collector is a very nice man, he’s easy to talk to, so that would mean a lot. Just go in and talk to him. He has a legal mandate to collect these taxes. It’s not just, ‘Oh, we want your money,’ it’s that we wouldn’t be doing our job [if we didn’t collect them].”
Dutton’s office is in the Anson County Government Building located at 101 S. Greene St., Wadesboro. For more information on tax collections, visit the office, call 704-994-3218, or email jdutton@co.anson.nc.us.