One page, 28 rows, and two different time markers

Denton County, Texas. The District Clerk publishes an excess tax funds file — one page in the version I pulled today: cause number, name, deposit amount, an "Excess Fund Date" column, plus a footer. With just four columns it teaches something worth practicing: the rows carry two different time markers, and they mean different things.

The two markers:

The year in the first segment of the cause number, before the first dash — written full or two-digit on this page (2012-0756-16, 18-9095-362).
The date in the Excess Fund Date column.

Those are not the same event. And the gap between the prefix year and the excess date is not constant — on the three rows below it runs from five to nine years.

Three examples straight off the page:

Cause 2012-0756-16 — prefix year 2012, excess fund date 5/5/2021. Nine years between the two.
Cause 18-9095-362 — prefix 2018, excess dated 9/21/2023. Five years.
Cause 19-7161-16 — prefix 2019, excess dated 9/30/2026. Seven years.

Now the exercise. The list is sorted alphabetically by name, not by date. So if your method is "start at the top," you're working the list in an order that tells you nothing about age. Before you touch a row, sort by the Excess Fund Date column yourself.

And notice what the four columns do not include: any claim-status field. A 2021 excess date on a 2012-prefix cause number is a fact about this page, not a fact about availability. One way to go deeper is to take a cause number to the district clerk's records search and read what the docket shows — the same docket-check rep as Homework #2.

Your rep for today: open the Denton file, sort the 28 rows by Excess Fund Date, then take the oldest-dated row that is NOT one of the three examples above and run its cause number through the district clerk's records search. Post in the comments on this post: the cause number, and what the most recent docket entry shows. No dollar amounts — this stays a counts-and-dates exercise.

Education, not legal advice. Claims are prepared and filed by independent licensed attorneys.

Source: Denton County (TX) District Clerk, excess tax funds file, dentoncounty.gov, downloaded 2026-10-11, footer "Current as of 10/01/2026". Full Circle Asset Recovery — fullcircleassetrecovery.com

0 comments

One page, 28 rows, and two different time markers