irs tax lien
I have recently come across a piece of property that I am interested in buying, after checking the records I have found that there is a mortgage and an irs tax lien on it. The mortgage was recorded first and the irs tax lien later. From what I understand, the owners still owe the mortgage company more than what the land is worth. If I buy this property, will all of the liens be cleared, even though there will not be enough monies to pay all of their liens off? 
The answer is: it depends! What state are you in?
In some states all liens go away, in some states even the hospital bill gets moved over to the new lien holder once s/he takes property. And there is every other version in between. Some liens don't carry mortgages but carry State tax liens, but not IRS liens; some carry no IRS lien, but carry hospital bills and a weed lien. It really depends on where you are.
How would you go about finding out what those rules are in your state?
Hi Lyn,
You can visit the National Tax Lien Association's website at www.ntlainfo.org for more information. Skip the intro at the beginning and then look for the legislature. There you click on the State you're looking to get information for. Within that information you can read pages and pages about the legislative laws. It gets quite confusing and is definitely written in Legalese. If in doubt, check with the local treasurer's office or the tax collector's office. They will most likely refer you to an attorney.
Know that whenever there is an IRS lien attached to a property, that they will most likely come after you no matter what. However, with a good attorney you can very often make them go away, since they only rarely have a right to get their lien paid for by the new owner, they just need to get the message that they need to go after the former owner who incurred the debt in the first place. Again, get an experience attorney to help you with this and don't take the IRS' word for it!
What you do have to pay is local tax liens such as weed liens, etc. They usually are pretty small though.
Good luck.