What happens to tax liens that survive the Chapter 7 discharge?

Well, tax liens do survive a Chapter 7 discharge. However, in a bankruptcy, there's a way to minimize that. In other words, if the house is worth, say, $300,000, it has a tax lien on it, and there's a mortgage of $310,000 then there's no equity in the home. It's important to do a motion to determine secured status in the bankruptcy to reduce the amount of the tax lien.

It can either drop it entirely, drop it by tens of thousands of dollars, that way if the house later were to accrue equity after you make payments for a series of years, the tax lien is minimized. That's one of the important things that you can do in bankruptcy.