> in the county's best interest to "accidentally" send notices to the wrong address.
Yeah, that's a nice way to end up in federal prison and the county to be on the hook to pay everyone back.
PS - According to the article, the house was seized in 2014 for a delinquency on the 2011 taxes. It wasn't something that happened after a single missed notice.
Come on, the owner knows that there is a property tax bill every year, and if they don't receive it on time they should get worried. Everyone knows when their credit card bill should show up and promptly pays even when the post office lost it.
This all depends on how much of a warning you get and such. Obviously if you only get a month's warning or something that would be bad, but if you're warned a year or two in advance I see no problem with this.
Set up a system were you can go to court to challenge it. In cases where notices were sent to the wrong address or you simply forgot interest you should be able to overturn this, sure.
That's not how property ownership works in America.
(However, in Michigan, the term required to acquire title by adverse possession is 15 years.)
But what you quoted:
> "In some cases, that's because county officials were mailing notices to unfinished homes or properties without permanent residents. In others, like Rafaeli's case, the notices were delivered to tenants who failed to pass along the information to their landlord, mistakenly believing that the county would inform the landlord separately."
It appears there are many cases where nothing was ignored. Notification wasn't received.
And that's without considering the perverse incentive where it's in the county's best interest to "accidentally" send notices to the wrong address.