Florida Federal Tax Liens — Daily New-Filing Feed

A daily feed of new federal tax lien filings recorded in Florida, normalized into a clean schema: debtor business name and address, secured party, filing date, assessment date, expiration date, document number.

A new federal tax lien means a business has unpaid federal taxes and the IRS has publicly staked a claim on its assets. For merchant cash advance brokers, equipment-finance lenders, factoring companies, and turnaround advisors, that is a high-intent distress signal: the business has an urgent, quantified liability and limited conventional credit options. Run this actor on a daily schedule and get only the filings you haven't seen before, filtered to the debtor states and name patterns you care about.

Why a feed instead of a search tool

Most lien actors are lookup tools: give a name, get filings. This actor is built for the lead-gen workflow instead:

• Dedupe across runs — document numbers already delivered are remembered in a key-value store, so a daily scheduled run behaves like an alert subscription.
• Automatic catch-up — with no date given it scans the last lookbackDays days and picks up any business day it missed (Florida publishes irregularly, business days only).
• Debtor filters — by state, or by name substring to watch an industry (e.g. TRUCKING) or a specific business.

Input

Field	Description
fileDate	One specific business day, YYYYMMDD. Optional.
lookbackDays	Days back to scan when no fileDate is given (default 7).
onlyNew	Dedupe against previous runs (default true).
debtorStateFilter	Two-letter states for the debtor address.
debtorNameContains	Case-insensitive substrings to match debtor names.
securedPartyContains	Case-insensitive substrings to match secured party names.
filingStatuses	A active, L lapsed, T terminated. Empty = all.
maxRecords	Cap output (0 = unlimited).

No input is required — the defaults produce the last week of new filings.

Output

One item per lien filing, with nested debtors[] and secured_parties[] arrays (a filing can name several of each). Dates are normalized to YYYY-MM-DD; the state's all-zero placeholder dates become empty strings. Counts are integers.

{
  "document_number": "26FLR0002760",
  "filing_date": "2026-07-29",
  "filing_status": "A",
  "filing_type": "F",
  "assessment_date": "2026-06-22",
  "expiration_date": "2036-07-22",
  "debtors": [
    {
      "name": "NAPLES HOME HEALTH INC",
      "name_format": "C",
      "address_1": "501 GOODLETTE RD N STE C200",
      "city": "NAPLES", "state": "FL", "zip_code": "341025666"
    }
  ],
  "secured_parties": [{ "name": "IRS JACKSONVILLE", "city": "JACKSONVILLE", "state": "FL" }]
}

Note that on federal tax liens the secured party is always the IRS, so the lead signal is the debtor. securedPartyContains is retained for the registry's non-FLR lien records (filing_type U).

Data source & access

Florida's Division of Corporations publishes federal tax lien data as four fixed-length ASCII files per business day (filings, debtors, secured parties, events) via its public data-downloads host. The actor reads the filings, debtors and secured-party files over HTTPS using the state's own published anonymous credentials and joins them on the document number.

• Files: https://sftp.floridados.gov/Public/doc/FLR/{FILINGS,DEBTORS,SECURED}/YYYYMMDDflr{f,d,s}.txt
• Record layout: https://dos.sunbiz.org/data-definitions/lien.html
• Portal: Florida data downloads

Parsing is positional against the published layout — these files carry no header row and no delimiter, so header-name matching does not apply. If the state changes a record length, the actor logs a warning naming the file and line rather than silently misaligning columns.

Lien filings are public records.

Why not UCC?

This actor originally targeted Florida UCC-1 financing statements. Florida does not publish UCC data in bulk: UCC filing was privatized to Image API, LLC in 2001, and the Florida Secured Transaction Registry is an authenticated pay-per-search portal with no bulk download. The Division of Corporations' public file host carries corporate, fictitious name, general partnership, trademark and federal tax lien data — no UCC. Federal tax liens are the closest freely-available equivalent signal for the same audience.

Pre-launch checklist

• Pull a real daily file and run locally (apify run) — verified against 20260729 (78 filings, 87 debtors, 78 secured parties) and 20260805 (66 filings, 75 debtors, 66 secured parties), all joining cleanly on document number, dates ISO-normalized, dedupe store working across runs.
• Verify every field offset against the state's published record layout.
• Fixed-width positional parser (the files are not delimited).
• Automatic daily-file URL construction from the date, so no input is required.
• Register the PPE event: lien-filing — "One lien filing delivered" — suggested $0.002-0.005/filing.

Roadmap

Same pattern, next states with free public lien/UCC bulk files: Illinois, Ohio, Georgia. Texas is behind paid SOSDirect — skipped deliberately.