In order for a tax title to convert to ownership, all parties must be “duly notified”:1
“Duly notified” means, with respect to a particular person, that an effort meeting the requirements of due process of law has been made to identify and to provide that person with a notice that meets the requirements of R.S. 47:2156, 2157, 2206, 2236, or 2275, or with service of a petition and citation in accordance with R.S. 47:2266, regardless of any of the following:
- Whether the effort resulted in actual notice to the person.
- Whether the one who made the effort was a public official or a private party.
- When, after the tax sale, the effort was made.2
Failure to provide notice of the date on which the tax sale will convert to ownership creates a redemption nullity.3 However, failure to provide notice under one statute can be cured by sending notice under a different statute enumerated in La. R.S. 47:2122(4). Furthermore, the Louisiana Supreme Court has specifically held that a tax sale purchaser may send curative tax sale noticing.4
The most common due process violations are failure to provide notice to a reasonably ascertainable address and failing to send additional notice if the original notice is returned undeliverable. The U.S. Supreme Court has spoken to both situations.
As regards addresses, notice by mail or other means as certain to ensure actual notice is a minimum constitutional precondition to a proceeding which will adversely affect the liberty or property interests of any party, whether unlettered or well versed in commercial practice, if its name and address are reasonably ascertainable.5 Failure to provide notice a reasonably ascertainable address often occurs when there have been multiple tax sales. Assessors assess properties in the name of the latest tax sale purchaser.6 Forgetting that the assessed address belongs to the latest tax sale purchaser, municipalities often mail tax sale notices in the name of the tax debtor to the assessed address.
Tax collectors must take an additional noticing step if all of the tax sale noticing efforts were returned to sender: “[W]hen mailed notice of a tax sale is returned unclaimed, the State must take additional reasonable steps to attempt to provide notice to the property owner before selling his property, if it is practicable to do so.”7 If any of the tax sale noticing was returned to the tax collector, be sure that any follow-up notice was sent to a separate address. Tax collectors have been known to send a second round of notice to the same insufficient address.
- 1La. R.S. 47:2121(C)(1).
- 2La. R.S. 47:2122(4).
- 3La. R.S. 47:2122(10), 2286.
- 4Cent. Props. v. Fairway Gardenhomes, LLC, 2016-1855 (La. 6/27/17), 225 So. 3d 441, 451 (“[W]e hold that, under the language of the applicable statutes, post-sale notice to the interested tax party may be effectuated by a tax sale purchaser . . . .”).
- 5Mennonite Bd. of Missions v. Adams, 462 U.S. 791, 800 (1983).
- 6La. R.S. 47:2161.
- 7Jones v. Flowers, 547 U.S. 220, 225 (2006).