NEWTON COUNTY, Ga. — Newton County Tax Commissioner Brent Bennett addressed concerns over several years of unpaid property taxes on the county digest, and how issues with collections mean he’s stuck “chasing shadows.”
Bennett told members of the Board of Commissioners that there were properties that did not pay taxes from 2014 to 2018, with the debts owed deemed uncollectible.
At the March 3 commission meeting, Bennett suggested removing the insolvent properties from the county tax digest.
During the meeting’s public comment portion, multiple county residents expressed concerns about how those taxes went uncollected for so long.
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According to Bennett, who took office as commissioner in 2024, many of the properties in question are on very small pieces of land, or have other business-related circumstances that made them insolvent for collection purposes.
“A lot of these properties are uncollectible because they’re slivers of land. In any business, you will have bad debt. There is no business, including tax, that you don’t have bad debt,” Bennett told the commission.
Bennett said some of the properties are uncollectible because they come from personal property belonging to businesses that have been closed for years.
“So, we can’t go back and go get the money from somebody that doesn’t exist,” Bennett said.
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The properties with uncollectible debt are now getting put up for tax sale, where the properties are bid on and sold to make up the missing revenue.
However, not all of the properties are able to be auctioned in this manner.
During the discussion with commissioners, Bennett explained that properties on the so-called “slivers of land” were so small that they could not be taken to be sold.
Bennett detailed how a similar process was managed in 2025, showing the difficulties.
“We actually had 260 properties that we scheduled,” Bennett said. “These all were multiple years. Everybody more than three years. So it included some of these. We ended up taking 102 to sale. Roughly 50 of them sold, 52, nobody bid on them.”
When asked by the commission, Bennett said he could not even provide them a dollar value for the missing revenue on unpaid properties because many of the documents and associated data is unavailable or was simply not in the system.
“It’s funny because the data that I use I can only use current data,” Bennett said. “With personal properties people sometimes don’t file a a return.”
He said business owners are supposed to file tax returns by April 1, but for owners who don’t file a return and close their business, the commissioner’s office doesn’t know the business is closed.
Bennett said that means the property ends up back on the tax digest for another year.
“So now I am forced to then go and track all these things and I’m chasing shadows,” Bennett said. “So quite frankly 2014 to 2018 and we’re over what $150, $160 million a year in tax collections. You’re looking at four years worth of taxes worth less than $280,000.”
Newton County Commissioner LeAnne Long asked about going to residents who previously owned the properties in question, saying she knew some personally and wanted to know what Bennett meant by uncollectible.
“Does it mean it’s uncollectible because we can’t get in touch? Are you just saying it’s personal property that the business has closed and we couldn’t collect on it, even if we knew to go to their house right now and ask them for the money?” Long asked.
Bennett responded by asking “who is going to pay it?”
In cases where there’s sometimes as much as 12 years in between, such as the unpaid taxes from 2014 to 2018, Bennett said those who owe the money are just “not going to pay it.”
“That’s why it’s deemed uncollectible,” Bennett said.
After a back and forth with Long, Bennett said the effort required wouldn’t be worth it.
“I’m not chasing those shadows, I’m going to tell you that,” he said. “That’s chasing shadows. We have 19 people, 18 people in our office. We don’t have the manpower for that.”
Bennett also explained that the amount of revenue from the properties with unpaid taxes wasn’t enought o justify it, saying over five years, it was only about $280,000 that was unpaid.
“We’re talking $60,000 a year, when we collect $160 million a year. Our collection rates are 99.89% on average,” Bennett said.
The collection rate he means is the amount of revenue taken in from what’s on the tax digest, where almost 100% of the digest has paid its taxes.
This is an increase from before he took office in 2024. Officials noted during the meeting that the collection rate was lower at about 84% in 2023.
Bennett told the commission he plans to have three or four tax sales in 2026 to handle some of the delinquencies on the county tax digest.
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