Category: News

Since being sworn-in as Philadelphia’s sheriff in January 2020, Rochelle Bilal has brought new levels of dysfunction to an office with a history of corruption and scandal going back to the mid-19th century.

Tax revenue plummeted, court security incidents soared, and millions of dollars in public money have been diverted into an office slush fund.

City Hall has ignored the mounting problems for the last six years. But this week Bilal must face a judge who could limit her ability to auction off foreclosed properties — arguably the office’s most important function.

Bilal, a former police officer and self-described reformer, is due to appear Wednesday before Common Pleas Court Judge Paula Patrick to explain why the judge should not appoint a “special master” or some other expert to fix major delays in processing deeds after sheriff sales.

Buyers have been waiting a year or longer after auction to receive their deeds, leaving the properties in a state of limbo that can invite squatters and contribute to blight. Without a deed, the foreclosed homes cannot be renovated, rented, or resold.

The Inquirer first reported on that problem in July 2024. An analysis of more recent financial records shows that the office has also earned millions of dollars in interest from property auctions. That is because the proceeds of the sales are sitting for long periods in TD Bank accounts the Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office controls, rather than being used to quickly settle old tax and utility liens.

Bilal’s office initially claimed the deed process was working as intended, saying through a spokesperson in 2024 that there was no “widespread delay” in recording deeds. With complaints continuing, she told City Council at an April budget hearing that it was the buyers who were responsible for the delays.

Neither statement was true.

In May, with buyers still petitioning the courts for their deeds, Judge Patrick, who is supervisor of the court’s commerce division, filed an order demanding that Bilal address the “ongoing harm” caused by the chronic backlog and submit extensive documentation pertaining to the handling of sheriff sales and related funds since she took office.

The court order said Bilal’s office appears not to be “timely performing its essential, nondiscretionary, ministerial duties, which are mandated by law.”

The sheriff snapped into action.

Within 48 hours of Patrick’s court order, Bilal’s office processed 277 deeds — filing more paperwork in two days than it had in the prior three months.

Last month, the office filed a response to the court order providing a new explanation for the delays: Bilal didn’t know about them.

Steven Wakefield, a newly hired attorney who serves as Bilal’s deputy undersheriff, blamed the problem on a former director of deeds who was “doing the work of multiple people” after the office switched software vendors in 2023, requiring some functions to be performed manually.

“The former director did not inform the sheriff of the backlog,” Wakefield wrote in a certification filed with the court on July 13.

The certification does not say when Bilal first became aware of the delays or why she remained in the dark while her then-undersheriff, Tariq El-Shabazz, was signing the deeds.

In a recent op-ed in City & State Pennsylvania, Bilal wrote that she was making “practical, measurable improvements designed to increase transparency, accountability and customer service.”

“I have never shied away from constructive scrutiny from the media, watchdog organizations and the public,” she wrote.

She declined to answer questions for this article.

An expensive problem

Cleaning up the deed mess has not been cheap.

Among thousand of pages of records Bilal’s staff submitted to the court last month is a check log showing that the office, beginning in March, paid more than $4.5 million from the proceeds of mortgage foreclosure sales to the Corporation Service Co., or CSC, a Utah-based financial services corporation.

Check memos describe the payments, equivalent to more than 10% of the office’s annual budget, as “deed processing fees.”

Wakefield’s certification to the court claimed that all deeds have been issued through June. He attributed the turnaround partially to new hires and the integration of the office’s Tyler Technologies software — a system that went live two years ago — but made no mention of the money paid to CSC.

“There is no further backlog of deeds to be issued,” he wrote.

Real estate agents, investors, and attorneys interviewed by The Inquirer in recent weeks said deeds are, in fact, being processed more quickly after the court order.

But the backlog has not been fully cleared.

“That is 100% incorrect,” Edward Levin, a real estate agent, said of Wakefield’s statement to the court.

Levin, whose firm resells homes following mortgage foreclosures, is still waiting on a handful of deeds from sheriff sales that took place in late 2024 and early 2025. They are supposed to be transferred within 40 days of settlement under state law.

Homes have fallen into disrepair in recent years because Bilal’s staff has taken so long to transfer the deeds. Levin does not know what to tell new buyers who are under contract to purchase the properties.

“I go to the properties once a week and I have to hear complaints from neighbors,” said Levin, who has dealt with squatters, overgrown lawns, and broken windows. “The people living next door to these properties get screwed the most.”

Mary Jo Potts, a foreclosure specialist at Elfant Wissahickon Realtors who resells those properties, said last week that she has seen a recent influx of deeds from the sheriff’s office.

But Potts and other real estate agents are still dealing with another problem: The sheriff’s office is taking even longer to distribute the proceeds from auctions to settle tax and utility liens on the properties.

Even with a deed in hand, the homes still cannot be resold without a clear title.

“To me, that’s not getting any better,” Potts said.

Financial records obtained by The Inquirer through a Right-to-Know request show that tens of millions of dollars began flowing into the sheriff’s coffers after auctions resumed for tax-delinquent properties in July 2024.

But the money trickled out much more slowly.

Twenty-two TD Bank checking accounts managed by the sheriff’s office contained a combined $39 million at the end of May 2024. By last August, that sum had swollen to $130 million.

The majority flowed into a business account earmarked for money from mortgage foreclosure sales. The combined sums are so large, statements show the office generated more than $3 million in interest between 2024 and 2025.

After all liens have been settled, any excess funds are owed to the former homeowner.

David Denenberg, an attorney who seeks to collect those funds, said Bilal’s system for distributing the proceeds of sales is worse than ever. He questioned the propriety of the office generating millions of dollars in interest by holding onto the funds.

“They’re making money on other people’s money,” Denenberg said. “They should be helping you, if you’re the purchaser or the one who lost their home. You shouldn’t have to flood the courts with this litigation.”

David Bogdan, a probate attorney in Delaware County, said he spent nearly two years trying to obtain about $26,000 in excess funds from a 2022 mortgage-foreclosure sale. The money was owed to the estate of the former homeowner, who had died.

“They just refused to pay,” Bogdan said. “There is no defense whatsoever. You have to return that money. It’s not yours.”

Bogdan, who filed his claim in July 2024, said he contacted the office at least a half dozen times over more than a year, getting either no response or new excuses for the delay. He ended up having to hire a second attorney, Denenberg, to take the sheriff’s office to court.

“They’re failing to do their basic duties,” said Bogdan, who in May finally received the funds owed to his clients. “It’s just torture dealing with them.”

Among the other records Bilal submitted to the court in July is a list of about 16,000 unique properties that had been ordered to sheriff sale since Bilal took office, worth a combined $1.2 billion, based on city tax assessments.

Only about 6,500 of those properties were ever successfully sold, according to the records, and many were repeatedly held back from the auction block, sometimes due to repayment or court orders, and sometimes for more opaque reasons.

While the new filings shed some light on the scale of the sheriff’s real estate operations, they do not appear to be the full disclosure requested by the court, which included “a detailed accounting of all sales proceeds received and disbursed” by the sheriff from 2020 to now.

None of the submitted records list any money distributed for sales later than 2023, and the sheets include numerous payments or credits that are missing dates or descriptions.

Daniel Bernheim, the lawyer for a property group whose March lawsuit triggered the court order, said he has been unable to follow the money based on the records the office has provided so far.

“It shouldn’t be like Where’s Waldo? It should be set forward clearly,” said Bernheim, who is also a township commissioner in Lower Merion. “I don’t know how you could function internally in the sheriff’s office if that information is not readily available.”

Lauren Cristella, president and CEO of the good-government group Committee of 70, said the court should require new oversight.

“The court should appoint a special master who will not just execute deeds but also process lien and utility payments so Philadelphians get what they’re owed without having to sue for it,” Cristella said.

Bilal named ‘Hometown Hero’

Both the Committee of 70 and the Pennsylvania Intergovernmental Cooperation Authority, Philadelphia’s fiscal watchdog, have called for the sheriff’s office to be abolished.

In addition to the operational issues, Bilal has been mired in one mini-scandal after another since she took office: the cover-up of an inspector’s “stolen” city-leased vehicle; a bungled arrest of a suspect that led to a fatal accident; fake AI-generated headlines touting her performance; a top aide violating city ethics rules; an employee in the office who shot himself in the leg before a budget hearing.

But despite that — and years of complaints from the public — both City Council and the mayor’s office have offered nearly universal praise for Bilal.

“Give our sheriff a huge round of applause,” Mayor Cherelle L. Parker said during her first budget address in March 2024, as Bilal’s botched sheriff-sale contract with an online auction firm was costing the city and the school district an estimated $35 million in uncollected tax revenue.

“I just want to thank you for your hard work and your dedication and working in partnership with members of Council and the city of Philadelphia,” Council President Kenyatta Johnson told Bilal at a budget hearing for her office the following month.

By then, Bilal had been diverting millions of dollars in service-fee revenue — public money Philly’s Home Rule Charter says should be remitted to the city’s general fund — into an internal office account that is used for “discretionary” purchases, including $40,000 in branded merchandise, a $9,000 office mascot, and a $6,600 party at Chickie’s and Pete’s.

“The city of Philadelphia works because you all work,” Councilmember Cindy Bass told Bilal at a budget hearing this April. It was at that hearing that Bilal falsely told Council that the problems with deeds had been fixed.

Last week, the Phillies ushered Bilal onto the field at Citizens Bank Park and honored her as a “Hometown Hero.” She swung an honorary bat.