TBW's Bankruptcy Means RE Taxes Aren't Being Paid

Thousands of property owners are receiving delinquency notices because their county real estate taxes were never paid out by the now-defunct Taylor, Bean & Whitaker, Ocala, Fla., which once serviced almost $80 billion in home mortgages. According to a report in the St. Petersburg Times, this "nightmare" for consumers is playing out throughout Illinois and other states where property taxes were due in full this month. In Illinois, Will County Treasurer Pat McGuire is responsible for collecting taxes on 1,746 parcels that were escrowed by the non-bank servicer. Only 398 of them, all serviced by Bank of America's mortgage department, made the Sept. 1 deadline, the newspaper reported. (The government transferred TBW's Ginnie Mae servicing to BoA.) All the rest were shipped delinquency notices last week. TBW's escrow problem centers on accounts the company had with Colonial Bank, which failed this summer and was seized by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (Colonial was TBW's warehouse lender.) Customers reported both insurance and taxes not being paid out of escrow. The FDIC — working as Colonial Bank's receiver — and TBW's bankruptcy counsel are working on a bankruptcy court plan to resolve control of the escrow accounts.