Potential IRS lien on a property won "free & clear"

[Account Closed]

Hello - I recently won a property at a Pennsylvania Sheriff's Sale auction. It was auctioned with a "free and clear" title. There are currently tenants residing there who referred me to their landlord (property owner not residing at the location). Interestingly, the property owner was rather polite in our initial phone discussion and his major concern was for me! The property owner said to "be careful" because he has had issues with the IRS and as a result there is an IRS lien on the property. Further, that the county, which sold the property "free and clear" of any liens, does not have the authority to clear IRS/Federal liens. My question is, is this possible? Or is the current owner just trying to scare me away? Can a lien still exist on the property even if the county lawyers advertised and sold it as "free and clear?" I'm not sure what my next steps are so any insight would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

[Steve Babiak]

@Chris K. - I think the OP did get this at Sheriff Sale rather than the TCB sale; remember that municipal lien thing I posted a few weeks back - that is what is at play here.

The judicial sale to extinguish liens can extinguish an IRS lien subject to IRS redemption rights (which are the greater of at least 120 days or the redemption period that the owner gets). But to extinguish the IRS lien, the IRS must be properly served notice of the sale or else the IRS lien survives. And as Chris posted, there is no guarantee that the IRS was served notice properly unless you can see that in the court dockets. So, when I look at sheriff sale listings (see sample of one in next link), I expect to see the USA named as a defendant, and you can see that in quite a few cases in the sample.

http://webapp02.montcopa.org/sherreal/salelist.asp...

Here I picked one of the cases from that list where the USA was named as defendant; see the link that gives the address that the USA uses in this region:

https://courtsapp.montcopa.org/psi/v/detail/Case/2...

On that docket you can see "3129" quite a few times - that is about serving notice.

If you do an Internet search, there should be some list of addresses telling where to serve the IRS / USA that you can find to see if this happened.

One thing about an IRS lien - it does not have a property parcel number associated, it simply attaches to the named parties (and any of their assets). So you have to do a Prothonotary lookup in your county by owner name to see the existence of the IRS lien.