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ST. LOUIS — Duan Brooks paid $20,000 at the city’s tax sale back in June for a small brick home on Itaska Street in Dutchtown.

He planned to fix up the abandoned property, which the city put up for sale at one of its annual auctions due to unpaid taxes, and sell it. It would get one of St. Louis’ thousands of vacant properties back on the tax rolls in a neighborhood that needs investment.

As prescribed by state law, the sale was confirmed by a judge in August. Brooks proceeded as if he owned the property, putting thousands of dollars into the rehab.

But he never received the deed to the property. Perplexed, he went to City Hall to figure out what the holdup was.

“I find out it had been sold,� Brooks said. “It’s like what the crap happened here?�

What happened is that the deed wasn’t recorded to reflect the sale to Brooks. Meanwhile, Chicago Equities LLC, the owner that had lost the property in the tax sale, was able to sell it in October to an Israeli couple. Now, Brooks will need to get the courts to step in again and resolve the title dispute.

“He’s going to have to do something at the courthouse if he’s going to be able to borrow on that property or sell it,� said Dale Sweet, an attorney and expert on the city’s tax foreclosure process. “And meanwhile the tax bills are going to Israel.�

Until Thursday, around 80 properties sold to people at this year’s tax foreclosure sales had yet to have the deeds documenting the property transfers recorded, according to the St. Louis Sheriff’s Office, which by state law conducts the tax sales.

Several buyers said they had contacted the sheriff’s office and St. Louis Recorder of Deeds about the problem only to be told it was a computer issue and they were working on it. The bureaucratic hang-up put dozens of properties and rehab projects in limbo, an unforced error in a city swimming in thousands of abandoned properties waiting on new owners and investors.

“We need to make it as easy for them as possible,� Sweet said.

In some instances, the delay appears to have violated state law, which governs the city’s tax sale process and says the new property deeds need to be recorded within two months of the court confirming the sales.

And both the sheriff’s office, which collects buyers’ money for the properties at the tax sale, and the recorder’s office suspect the issue stems from St. Louis Comptroller Darlene Green’s office and a new city accounting system that has roiled the functions of city government for over a year.

“That new system the city has instituted is giving everybody hell in terms of getting stuff done,� Sheriff Vernon Betts said.

The issue, the sheriff and recorder say, is the money taken out of the purchase price to cover the recording fees hadn’t made its way from the sheriff’s office to the right account in the recorder’s office.

“The money is sitting somewhere in this city,� Capt. Tim Haill of the sheriff’s office said Wednesday. “We’re really digging into this to try and figure out where this money is at.�

He suspects it’s a money transfer issue with the new Oracle accounting system instituted by the comptroller’s office last year. The Post-Dispatch last month reported many city vendors and contractors have been paid weeks or months late because of the system, and the newspaper spoke to staff at City Hall who described a messy rollout from Green’s office.

Haill, for instance, said the sheriff’s office had its credit card declined when Betts tried to use it at a hotel while he was out of town.

“We have a city credit card for the sheriff’s office where the credit card company said ‘nah, we’re not renewing that because no one paid the bill,’� Haill said.

The money transfer between the sheriff and the recorder, two “county� offices governed by state statute rather than the city charter, has to flow through the comptroller’s office in City Hall. But it wasn’t flowing the way it was supposed to, Sweet said. He’s never seen delays affect so many tax sale deeds before, and he’s been following tax sales for years.

“The money exists somewhere, the deed exists somewhere,� Sweet said. “Why aren’t the money and the deed ending up in the same room and updating the land records?�

St. Louis Recorder Michael Butler said his office has had no issue keeping up with tax sale deeds from the sheriff’s office. But he said the account where the recording fees from the tax sales usually land never got the money. When it lands in that account, that lets the recorder’s office know there are deeds that need to be recorded, and the recorder can then contact the sheriff’s office to obtain the deeds and get them recorded.

Butler, too, suspected the Oracle system was to blame for the miscommunication.

By Thursday, two days after the Post-Dispatch had begun contacting the sheriff, recorder and comptroller — all three elected positions — about the problem, the three offices scrambled to resolve it.

Butler said Wednesday evening he told the sheriff’s office to bring the unrecorded deeds over to his office and they would get them recorded by the end of the week, worrying about tracking down the fees — about $60 per deed — later.

“I told him go ahead and bring the deeds down,� Butler said, adding the fix would hopefully be a welcome “Christmas gift� for the people trying to get their property paperwork in order before the end of the year.

By Thursday afternoon, many of those deeds, including the one for Brooks’ house on Itaska Street, had been recorded.

And by Thursday afternoon, Haill, at the sheriff’s office, said he had met with Deputy Comptroller Beverly Fitzsimmons, seen by many as the top problem solver in the office, and fixed the issue. The money had been sent to the recorder’s office, Haill said Fitzsimmons told him, just not to the account for recording tax sale deeds.

Comptroller Green’s spokeswoman, Tiara Thomas, confirmed Thursday the money had been sent. Haill said Fitzsimmons told him the process is set up now so that the issue shouldn’t happen again after next year’s tax sales. But it was another example of a kink in the bureaucracy as City Hall gets used to its new accounting system.

“Nobody wants to admit it,� Haill said. “What’s the common denominator? Oracle.�

Editor’s note: An earlier online version of this story omitted the full name of attorney Dale Sweet.