The Badger State just became a better place to live and own a home. A recently passed law bans counties from engaging in an unjust practice known as “tax and take” or “home equity theft.”

Home equity theft is only possible in around a dozen states across the United States. In those states, if you fall behind your property taxes, local governments can seize and sell the tax-delinquent properties and keep all the profits from the sale, even when the property sells for much more than the tax debt.

Wisconsin used to be one of these “tax and take” states. But on March 31, Gov. Tony Evers signed a law requiring counties to return any windfall from tax sales to the former owners. Previously, only homestead owners could claim such tax sale proceeds — and only if they did so within 60 days of notice.

According to data obtained through public record requests by my colleagues at Pacific Legal Foundation, at least 900 Wisconsin homeowners across eight Wisconsin counties had lost their homes and all equity they had built in their homes between 2014 and 2021. But that figure significantly understates how widespread the equity theft problem was. The data we examined did not include nonresidential properties and only covered a third of the Wisconsin population.

To continue reading the rest of the article, please click on the source link below:

https://pacificlegal.org/the-washington-examiner-wisconsin-ended-home-equity-theft-other-states-should-follow/

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