The Major Credit Bureaus announced that tax liens and civil judgement will not appear anymore on credit reports as of this past July 1, 2017. This is definitely an impactful decision to the lending industry and to the taxing authorities. Basically the lenders will have to dig deeper with potential lending candidates to determine if any taxes are owed. Given the issue involved it is not as easy to get an answer to the question of tax compliance as it used to be when there was notice of the tax lien in the credit report. So the applicant may owe taxes and there is no lien to put the public on notice.
This also hurts the integrity of the tax system. Previously if there was a tax debt owed, a tax lien put the world on notice of this debt and the repercussions if business was transacted with the taxpayer. For instance, if a house was purchased, the lien would attach to the house and the lender would have an immediate tax problem with its collateral. Obviously, if the lender would have known in advance, they would have demanded that this problem be solved before loaning the money.
It is possible to foresee situations in the future, where credit decisions are made without full public information, causing unnecessary harm to the parties involved. We believe that the policy is solely beneficial to the credit bureaus who have less obligations to report information than previously, while this could harm the business community and public at large.
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