Yeah, liens or something like that. With maybe more recourse if it drags on for decades. I also don’t want to reward people for building up a huge unpaid tax bill.
Liens are placed I am sure. And sure, they don’t want to incentivize delinquencies. But after several years this lady owed about $2k. Not worth all the trouble. It is (at least in my state) a small claim and there are small claim courts. Yeah if you ran up unpaid taxes worth a considerable portion of the value of the property then it would seem more reasonable. But in this case the debt before interest and fines was something under 5% of the price the state sold it for (I don’t know the value if it were marketed and sold). That’s a lot of bureaucrats shuffling a lot of paper for a small amount of money.
I suspect the lady bought the condo for a very low price decades ago. She was probably paying a low tax based on the purchase price. When the county re-sells it the tax gets re-assessed at the higher valuation. So the county makes out 2x - they keep the profit, and get to revalue the property and tax the new owner at the higher valuation.