Can you discharge tax liens in bankruptcy?

There are certain types of tax debt that, under certain circumstances, can be discharged in a bankruptcy filing. However, if a tax lien existed on your property before you filed for bankruptcy, the lien will remain, even if you are no longer required to repay the tax debt in question as a result of the bankruptcy filing. Therefore, you would have to pay off the lien if you wanted to sell the property to which the lien had been attached.

If the IRS fails to file a Notice of Federal Tax Lien before the bankruptcy filing, however, then the lien can be removed from a person’s pre-bankruptcy property, even if the person had exempted that property from their bankruptcy estate. On the other hand, if a person did not include a particular property in a pre-bankruptcy estate, then any liens eventually applied to that property would not be eligible for discharge, even if the IRS failed to file a Notice of Federal Tax Lien.