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COMPANY
First American Real Estate Tax Service is the premier provider of real property tax services and information nationwide. With more than 75 years of experience, First American services more than 27 million loans for thousands of lenders. Our leadership position is sustained through our commitment to customer service, quality, technology, and innovative services. We employ more than 2,000 experienced tax professionals located throughout the country to provide prompt and efficient responses to your needs.
We are dedicated to meeting the specialized needs of the mortgage lending community, recognizing the unique requirements of prime, non-prime, and subservicing environments.
Additionally, we offer the most comprehensive set of time-tested services available in the industry, ranging from tax data to the outsourcing of traditional tax department functions.
Tax Amount Reporting and Payment Service
There's good reason First American is the nation's premier tax reporting and payment service - we assure accurate and timely reporting of property tax information for escrowed loans. And we do it in the following ways:
- Tracking tax bill requests and payment dates, and securing formatting requirements for over 22,000 taxing jurisdictions.
- Implementing extensive automation with tax collectors from coast-to-coast.
- Delivering your tax information accurately and on time.
- Offering the nations largest infrastructure to support our customers needs.
- Pioneering innovative service offerings such as ATSU and Tax Outsourcing.
Tax Outsourcing
Today, First American provides tax outsourcing services for more than 15 million loans. This time-tested service is both robust and efficient enabling our customers to enhance borrower satisfaction and reduce internal operating costs. We can customize processing rules to your requirements. The service outsources virtually every function related to tax payments, including:
- Payment processing, balancing and delivery
- Open item processing
- Return and refund check processing
- Borrower inquiry research
- Review of delinquent tax notices
- Bank account reconciliation
Delinquency Reporting Services
We monitor the payment status for loans where the borrower is responsible for paying taxes directly to the taxing jurisdiction. Through our automated interfaces with the collectors and extensive field personnel, we can promptly notify you of delinquent taxes and provide updated data when required. Our services can also assist with regulatory and investor reporting requirements. We provide an array of services including:
- Payment outsourcing of delinquent taxes according to your guidelines
- Producing and mailing delinquent notices to borrowers
- Risk Management Reporting, including a Severity Report to track items eligible for tax sale
- Letter mailing and tracking services
Accelerated Tax Line Set-Up (ATSU)
First American is the only tax service provider to offer the fully automated Accelerated Tax Line Set-Up (ATSU) system, which benefits both the origination and servicing side of the mortgage industry. We ascertain the information necessary to set up customer tax lines on your service bureau system. The quality of data required eliminates the necessity for the new loan escrow data to be reviewed as it is loaded on the servicing system.
Another benefit of this process is the automatic upload of all ATSU orders to the tax servicing system upon notification that the loan has been funded. This can significantly reduce missing bill counts because the loan is being contracted immediately after closing. This result's in a direct reduction in tax penalties and staff time spent researching and correcting errors. New loan setup problems associated with tax processing are significantly reduced, thus avoiding potential consumer service issues.
instantData
InstantData is a real time automated solution to facilitate transmittal of property tax information to your loan origination system, point-of-sale system, or website to assist with the creation of good faith estimates and/or HUD 1.
Property Locator System (PLS)
Our Property Locator Service (PLS) property database allows our customers to access more than 22,000 taxing authorities and gather tax information at their convenience. PLS operates under the umbrella of the FASTWeb presentation on the Internet.
Tax information is divided into three levels and priced accordingly. Tier 1 consists of property and taxing agency information. Tier 2 consists of property, agency, legal, and tax identification number information. Tier 3 consists of property, agency, legal, tax identification number, and tax amount information.
- Origination Uses: Single source for tax information to close a loan. Tax amounts can be used for Good Faith Estimates (GFE's), Escrow Analysis, and accurate payment projections.
- Servicing Uses: Locating missing tax bills for payment, and as a research tool to answer borrower questions. Tax data research issues can also be resolved using the tax collector records provided.
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