The reason some Klamath County landowners haven't paid their property taxes

It turns out that the reason is very simple:

That's right, they're dead!

I have been doing "skip tracing" on bounced (invalid address) mailings I have sent. On one of these the new mail came back marked

DECEASED 5 years ago

So I started looking for more of these in the data and the records seem to have plenty, including one guy that I found this evening that died in 2014!

So I've started writing to these addressed to "Estate/Next of Kin of [the non-taxpayer]."

I just have sent out 4 of these the past few days, but I envision that this should return more like a 20% or better response rather than 3-5% for the normal "alive" contingent ...

We'll see!

By the way, my skip tracing tool is Whitepages.com, which works well and is only $5 per month for up to 20 searches.

More next week ...