My idea: If someone registers a bounty via the mechanical means available and then perms or otherwise stops existing as a character, there should be a couple of weeks and then the bounties they've placed should time out. The house keeps the money.
Over the years I've seen multiple instances of people blowing more money than they'd have been comfortably able to do in life on a bounty and then peacing out or suiciding, leaving the target no real recourse except to accept the inevitable. Dying js not always a huge deal from a gameplay perspective, but people tend to RP some modicum of self preservation and understandably sometimes turtle up when this happens, which slows things way down until they finally get got and can get back to biz.
I don't think either player in that instance is guilty of poor behavior, but if the client is alive the target at least has a chance to wriggle out of it or hit back.
Putting the timeout a few weeks out would still give hunters the chance to collect and could still throw a meaningful shadow over someone's head if it was meant as a final fuck you. Yes there are some ways to circumvent the timeout if you use your noodle but those would necessarily leave someone alive in the city who physically registered the bounty.
Similarly, permed characters should be cleared out of the system to prevent clutter.