Hanover is not auctioning off homes in Feb.

Some Hanover County residents who are behind on their real estate taxes have gotten phone calls and mail saying their homes will be sold at a county auction next month.

County officials say the calls and mailings are false, and that there's no county auction scheduled for Feb. 28, the date given to the homeowners.

The calls have been coming from clients of TaxSale Lists.com, a Web site that aggregates and sells public information about delinquent taxpayers to third-party companies, said Hanover Treasurer Scott Miller.

The calls may be coming from multiple sources that want to profit from tax sales, Miller said, and they are not affiliated with the county. The callers offer to buy the properties.

John Lane, chief executive officer of Colorado-based TaxSaleLists.com LLC, said he'd never experienced such a "brouhaha" in connection with his service.

The site contains 40,000 lists from across the country of properties whose owners are delinquent paying taxes. Lane said the Feb. 28 date on the Hanover list comes from a function of his database that requires that an auction date be entered even if the house is not actually going to be sold.

Standard procedure is to add 90 days from the date he receives the list, which was at the end of November for Hanover, Lane said.

He said he is working to change the database's date-coding system.

Lane said his Web site clearly says that the delinquent list is not a list of properties for sale and that the majority of property owners will pay their taxes, but that some may use the list to get a potential jump on sales.

Hanover holds auctions for properties on which taxes are owed, but only after the taxes have gone unpaid by Dec. 31 for at least two years.

Miller said homeowners with properties that are eligible to be auctioned know well ahead of time.

"We don't sell [homes] in a vacuum," Miller said. "We want [homeowners] to know what's going on."

Homes sold at an auction this year would have been behind on taxes from 2006 or earlier. Properties with delinquent taxes beginning in 2007 wouldn't be eligible for an auction until Jan. 1, 2010.

Miller said there are about 2,000 delinquent parcels in the county, or 5 percent of all parcels. That's typical, he said.

Anyone who's received a phone call or mail is encouraged to call the Hanover treasurer's office at (804) 365-6145.

Contact Holly Prestidge at (804) 649-6945 or .