Court Opinion

ID: 9535929
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-07 06:46:46.596945+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T13:33:23.363636
License: Public Domain

JUSTICE SIMON, specially concurring: My concurrence in the result is because the bank as trustee received notice of the hearing by registered mail approximately four months before it took place. Having received this notice through its trustee, petitioner could have presented its defense to the trial court. For this reason I agree with the majority that the petitioner could have had his day in court except for his own lack of diligence, and therefore he is ineligible for section 72 relief. The majority appears, however, to be saying that even had the notice by registered mail not reached the bank, the property owner would have had no recourse unless he could establish actual fraud, that is, intentional deception, in the failure of the sheriff to make service. I do not agree with this approach, for it unilaterally exalts the rights of the purchaser at a tax sale above those of the delinquent property owner. That the majority reaches this result in the name of merchantability of tax titles does not, in my judgment, make it respectable. The 1976 amendment to section 263 of the Revenue Act requiring that the property owner be served by the sheriff was a salutary measure designed to insure that property owners who had failed to pay taxes would not forfeit their property without knowing about it. Forfeiture for nonpayment of taxes is no less unpleasant, and in some cases no less tragic, to a property owner who loses his property without notice because of negligent errors of the sheriff’s deputy, as a court finds happened here, than because of deceit on the part of the deputy. I do not understand why the failure of the sheriff’s deputy to make proper service in this case should not be treated in the same way as such a failure would be in any other case in which the sheriff fails to effect a service for which the law makes him responsible. Notwithstanding the General Assembly’s deletion in 1970 of language in the Revenue Act permitting “defenses relating to questions of notices required by section 263,” upon which the majority opinion seems to place strong emphasis (92 Ill. 2d at 408), section 72 is still left intact by the Revenue Act as a vehicle available to the property owner to raise questions of failure of service, as it is available to any other litigant claiming he had not received service. The historical note to section 266 of the Revenue Act indicates that the 1970 amendments to section 266 were “to clarify meaning where ambiguous.” (Ill. Ann. Stat., ch. 120, par. 747, Historical Note, at 58 (Smith-Hurd Supp. 1981).) Thus, it does not appear that these amendments were intended to take challenges to notice out of the panoply of remedies available to property owners. It is likely that the legislature feared that the separate inclusion of challenges to notice in the statute would lead to questions as to whether section 72 was a vehicle for raising such challenges. The cases on which the majority relies to support the proposition that the delinquent must show actual fraud to prevail even where he was not served with notice are not relevant. They did not involve service required to be made by the sheriff, as the 1976 amendment to section 263 commands. Rather, they involved services predating the 1976 amendment, which were then made by the tax purchaser instead of by the sheriff. The sanctification the majority opinion gives to the handling of the notice by the sheriff opens the door for too many irregularities. There appears to be no adequate way of policing service by the sheriff such as, for example, in this very case where at best inexcusable confusion took place. Deputy Nodell acknowledges that he was guilty of gross negligence here — leaving the notice at the wrong place because he mixed it up with some other papers which he was serving at that place. I do not think that property owners, even those who have not paid their taxes, should be left at the mercy of this type of official oversight where apparently there was no internal check upon Deputy Nodell’s performance which might have discovered it. The intention of the 1976 amendment to section 263 was, I believe, to make it more certain that property owners would actually receive notice of a pending tax sale of their property, and to avoid abuses of the type which occurred when the law permitted the tax purchaser himself to serve notice on the property owner. The majority opinion, I fear, is a step in the direction of repeating what unfortunately has occurred too often in the past — approving tax forfeitures about which the property owner first learns after it is too late. For that reason, I would regard the failure to effect proper service on the property owner as cognizable under section 72 had the notice not been received through the registered mail.