@RobertEG wrote:The period for exclusion of tax liens does not begin to run until the lien is paid.
I am curious as to why your CR would show a projected exclusion date on an unpaid lien. What is the reported status?
I don't think it's fully coded into the system: the CRA's have to drop them at the 10 year mark if paid, but unpaid is a little bit of a grey area; however, the lien holder can simply re-report it with impunity if it so desires if unpaid and I think this is what's typically done. I do know first-hand that an unpaid tax lien can drop off early (EQ, go figure that)
In theory it should just stay on there forever if unpaid, but I don't think the bureaus housekeeping batches work that way historically.
To the OP: look at the requirements for your state of residence, in some cases if you pay them they can be removed, and they're typically a fraction of the size of Federal liens. In the second case, you're sort of in the same boat as me (I did something incredibly stupid tax-wise circa 2000 and a summary judgement got entered in 2003): you can negotiate with the IRS either directly or through a third party, and there's 4 broad categories for appeal: one of them being no real ability to ever pay it back.
On the Fed side, if you either pay it (negotiated or otherwise) or enroll in a Direct Debit agreement (some monthly payment arrangement pulled direclty out of your bank account) you can get the lien removed from your records. This second option is what I'm looking at, like you I can't conceivably pay it outright and while you have to account for that in a DTI calculation, it's better than the alternatives.
