‘I don’t care what he says’: Supreme Court taking up fight over house county stole

The Supreme Court is taking up the fight in Michigan over a house that a county essentially stole.

Officials in Isabella County actually took control of a 3,000-square-foot home originally purchased by Scott Pung and evicted his descendants.

All for a tax bill for which Pung had obtained an ongoing exemption.

So the bill never should have existed.

It is the Pacific Legal Foundation that explained when Pung first bought the house, he “secured a tax exemption for a supplemental property tax.”

It was an ongoing exemption, and when Scott died in 2004 and his wife in 2008, his son, Marc, took control of the house.

“Under Michigan law, the tax exemption continued automatically as long as family members lived in the home. Marc lived there with his wife and young child. No additional paperwork was required,” the legal team explained.

That wasn’t enough, however, for Patricia DePriest, a local tax assessor.

“Despite clear statutory language protecting the Pungs, she retroactively denied the exemption for several previous years, arguing that Scott’s heirs should have resubmitted paperwork,” the foundation explained.

At the Michigan Tax Tribunal, an administrative law judge ruled for the family, and still that didn’t make any difference to DePriest.

“When asked during a subsequent hearing about the administrative law judge’s ruling that the family didn’t need to file additional paperwork, she replied defiantly: ‘I don’t care what he says; the law says that you do,'” the report said.

That tax had accumulated to about $2,000, something the family legally didn’t owe.

But the county demanded foreclosure and took the $200,000 dwelling in 2015, selling it for $76,000.

“The county kept all the money and evicted Marc, his wife, and their young child from the family home.

“When government takes more than it is owed to settle back taxes, it’s home equity theft. In 2023, the Supreme Court deemed the practice unconstitutional in Tyler v. Hennepin County, which PLF brought to the Court,” PLF noted.

So the Pungs sued and a trial court held that the government violated the Constitution by taking more than it was owed. But rather than pay the Pungs for what had been wrongly taken, the court held that the county only had to hand over the windfall the government had taken at the Pungs’ expense—the surplus proceeds from a poorly run auction, the report said.

“The government should never have foreclosed on the Pungs to collect a debt that was improperly imposed. The Pungs deserve payment for what was taken—a $200,000 home minus any ‘debt.’ The Eighth Amendment also prohibits excessive fines, including destroying $118,000 in equity to collect $2,242 that was never owed in the first place. The penalty far outweighs any alleged wrongdoing.”

Now it will be up to the Supreme Court to decide how the confiscation by the county for a tax bill that was wrongly assessed should be handled.