City of Baltimore
Department of Finance
Bureau of Revenue Collections

IMPORTANT PUBLIC NOTICE

11/10/21

THIS NOTIFICATION IS RELATED TO ALL DEED TRANSFERS THAT REQUIRE A LIEN CERTIFICATE AND DOCUMENTS THAT ARE EITHER MAILED IN OR DROPPED OFF IN OUR DROP BOX.

Historically, prior to the pandemic, the Transfer Tax Office has always required that all liens be paid in full prior to submitting the documents for processing.

It is the responsibility of the Title Company or other responsible party to ensure that all liens are paid in full before you drop or mail documents at/to our office.

This includes having tax sales redeemed and the lien cert signed off, calling housing for advance bills, calling to have credits pro-rated and any and all other notations that may be included on the Lien Certificate.

Since the pandemic, our office has been lenient and relaxed these rules from March 2020 until now, primarily because the Municipal Building was closed to the Public.  

The customer has always had the ability to go online and pay the liens prior to submitting the documents for processing, however more often than not we have been receiving numerous checks for liens that have not been paid. Processing check payments can be a very time consuming and tedious process that is handled by the City’s Billing Section. Sometimes this includes billing functions like printing bills, calculating interest and penalties to determine what was due at the time of submissions, marking up the bills and taking them to the cashiers.

As a courtesy, we have been calling various City Agencies to determine if there are any open alley or footway bills, Tax Sale Redemptions, Bankruptcy Water Charges just to name a few. All of these additional tasks and duties has contributed greatly to our already long turn around period.

The Municipal Building re-opened to the Public on August 16, 2021 and once again customers can go online to pay open liens. There is no reason for us to continue processing checks for open liens. Alleviating our already small staff from these additional duties will give us an opportunity to focus on processing documents and will significantly reduce our processing time.

Effective January 1, 2022 we will no longer be accepting documents that have open liens. We will no longer be accepting or processing check payments for open liens.

Once again, this is not a new policy, we are simply reverting back to our former policy prior to the pandemic.

When we review the lien certificate we will go to our systems to see if the lien (s) have been satisfied. If there is a balance due, we will then check the documents to see if there are any validated receipts, either from our cashier section or from our online system. If the liens have not been previously paid, the documents will be returned unprocessed.

Just a friendly reminder that as long as your lien certificate is valid on the date that the documents were submitted it will be honored. It does not matter if it expired while it was in our office waiting to be reviewed. Also, the customer is only required to pay the amount of liens that were due and owing on the date of submission.

As long as everything is complete and correct and all liens were previously paid the documents will be accepted and processed. If the documents are subsequently rejected because everything was not complete and correct the documents will be rejected and returned and the customer will be required to obtain a new lien certificate.

Thank you for your patience and cooperation during these unprecedented times. We are doing everything possible to reduce our backlog so that we can continue to provide excellent customer service.

The Property Transfer Unit