In this series of short articles, I have been sharing my thoughts about what I observe in my review of the Colorado Judicial Branch’s Annual Statistical Reports for 2015 and 2016 (each is a “Report”). These Reports contain statistics for the Colorado Supreme Court, the Court of Appeals, Colorado’s District Courts, Colorado’s County Courts, and the Water Court, among other things. These reports are available to the public via the Courts’ website: https://www.courts.state.co.us/Administration/Unit.cfm?Unit=annrep

In my last article I made much of the few civil trials that actually occurred on the 101,112 civil actions filed in 2015. However, upon further review of the Report details, it turns out that the vast bulk of those civil filings, 70,147 filings in fact (or 69% of all 2015 civil filings), are in fact “Distraint Warrant” filings. To be candid, I had no idea what those were. I cursed myself (ok, only a little) for being completely unaware of an area of civil law constituting the bulk of Colorado civil court filings. Therefore, I decided to focus this article on Distraint Warrants with the idea that, if I didn’t know what those were, others might also be clueless and therefore interested.

Distraint Warrants

A Colorado Distraint Warrant is part of the property tax collection mechanism in Colorado. Distraint warrants are a legally enforceable means of ensuring future payment on back property taxes and liens from delinquent taxpayers. According to the helpful Jefferson and Mesa County websites, a Distraint Warrant itself is a document served by the sheriff that indicates the amount of overdue taxes, the due date and instructions prohibiting the removal or destruction of any property within the business. When taxes go unpaid paid, the property can be seized, advertised and sold for the amount of taxes and expenses due.

The statutory authority for the issuance of Distraint Warrants is codified in Section 39-21-114, C.R.S. Very briefly, the statute authorizes the department of revenue to issue to a warrant to a departmental agent, which commands the agent to ‘distrain, seize and sell’ the personal property of the taxpayer when the tax owed has not been paid within 30 days from the mailing of a tax deficiency notice. Pursuant to subsection (2)(a), the warrant is then served on the taxpayer. The agent may then file, pursuant to subsection (3), a copy of the warrant with the district court (which is probably what we are seeing with those 70,147 court filings in 2015). The clerk then enters it as a judgment in the judgment docket. After that, the clerk of court will issue a transcript of that judgment, which can be filed with the county clerk and recorder. At that point, the warrant becomes a lien on all of the real estate of the debtor in that county.

Of further interest here, in subsection (8)(b.5), is that the tax authority is specifically authorized to hire private collection agencies and/or law firms to help with the collection effort.

Is there an appeal? Yes, but not apparently from the warrant filing itself. The appeal mechanism for property taxes are administrative appeals, which generally cannot go to court until the administrative process has run its full course. The appeal should be made as soon as possible after the tax assessment itself has been made by the tax authority. One usually sees the administrative procedure for the appeal on the tax assessment document itself.

In the prior article, I referred to the Counties of Denver, El Paso, Jefferson, Arapahoe, Adams, Douglas, and Boulder as the “Counties” because more than half of civil filings were located in those Counties. In the case of Distraint Warrant filings, in 2015 the Counties logged a total of 52,487 of the overall 70,147 Colorado filings (or 75%).

Conclusions

First, it is obvious that the vast bulk of what we see in the Report as “civil filings” in Colorado are in fact property tax judgments from the tax authority, not private civil matters, as I had first assumed.

Second, the real number of private civil lawsuits in 2015 was probably closer to 30,965 (101,112 less the 70,147 Distraint Warrant filings).

In my next article, I will discuss the remaining types of civil litigation comprising the remaining 30,965 filings in 2015.

I look forward to your comments. Call me at (303) 757 3344 to discuss.