The decision by lenders such as Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase to halt most or all foreclosure sales will affect homeowners across the country, who will likely be kept in their homes for weeks or months, the Wall Street Journal reported. So far, there are few signs that lenders and servicers will undo substantial numbers of the foreclosure proceedings being reviewed across the U.S. No one has been “evicted out of a home who shouldn’t have been,” James Dimon, JPMorgan’s chairman and CEO, said last week. Halts in foreclosure sales are likely to cause little financial impact on banks in the long run, according to Wall Street analysts. Americans for Financial Reform, a Washington-based group of consumer, investor and small business organizations, called for a temporary moratorium on foreclosures on Friday, saying there should be a new process ensuring that lenders are following the rules. [WSJ]

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From left: James Dimon, whose firm JPMorgan Chase owes $300,000; Crowne Plaza JFK, which owes $944,491; the Holiday Inn JFK, which owes $852,239; Gordon DuGan, whose firm W. P. Carey & Co. owes $464,000 (Dimon photo source: Public Intelligence)

Tax debtors beware: New York State is calling you out.

Last Friday, the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance went live on its Web site with lists of the top 250 individual and corporate tax debtors in the state.

The individual debtors range from Onandaga County resident Bradley Cooke, who owes $381,509, to Irving Bilzinsky, the former Scores strip clubs owner from Brooklyn who topped out the list with more than $15 million outstanding taxes from between 2007 and 2009. Among businesses, Gui Hong Chen, of Queens, took the top spot with more than $19 million in unpaid corporate taxes.

This week, The Real Deal combed through the newly-public documents to find the worst offenders in New York City real estate.

They include luxury broker Agnes Nolan and her late husband, who owe more than $850,000 in personal income taxes, a subsidiary of real estate investment firm W.P. Carey, which has a warrant out for roughly $464,000, and JPMorgan Chase Bank, which owes upwards of $300,000 (see the full list after the jump).

Perhaps the highest-profile individuals listed were Ponzi-schemer Bernard Madoff (No. 69, with $984,281 in sales taxes) and celebrity fashion photographer Annie Leibovitz (No. 83, with $503,740 in personal income taxes outstanding). Earlier this week, Leibovitz narrowly avoided emergency sales of her four New York homes — three Greenwich Village brownstones and part of the Astor family’s estate in Rhinebeck, N.Y. — when a Los Angeles private equity firm specializing in distressed real estate agreed to take on her millions of dollars in debt. [more]