It started with a voice mail from my credit union. The garbled message said something about our savings account and the California Franchise Tax Board (FTB). We have lived in Alaska since August, 2005, so this was a puzzler.
I called the credit union, but the caller had left no extension. Blind alley. I called the FTB down in CA. The person handling my case at the FTB (would not give her last name; I will call her ‘Diane’), asked many questions (SSN, address, etc. etc.) My question was, “What the h*** is going on here?” She told me that since the Bank of America had reported we had paid mortgage interest in 2006 and 2007, they wanted to know how we were paying the mortgage without income. Assuming we must owe taxes on that imagined income, they had levied (taken) over $10,000 from our account!
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Of course, we had not filed CA state income taxes since 2005. We do own a vacation property in CA, on which we have a mortgage with B of A. I explained the situation (we moved to Alaska, duh!—our 2005 CA tax return shows our new AK address). After some Kafkaesque back and forth, and my faxing the latest 1098 from B of A, Diane promised to fax the credit union to undo the damage and return our money. She did not remember to press ‘send’ however, so the fax did not go through until I had called the credit union to check and then called her back to see what the problem was.
So think about this for a moment: Based on the merest hint of possible tax-avoidance, plus pure speculation about the amount of the imaginary underpayment, a state agency can get a legal injunction to take over $10,000 for some poor shmo’s bank account. If you can prove they are wrong, they may give it back. What is wrong with this picture?
The most galling thing, however, was that Diane kept insisting that the whole thing was my fault for not giving the FTB a forwarding address when we moved out of state. They sent mail to our old address, but we did not live there any more. When I pointed out that they had our new address on our 2005 tax return, Diane said, ‘I don’t see that information on my screen.’ Ah: arrogance plus incompetence plus a lack of gumption, the perfect storm.
I am sure Diane deals with lots of deadbeats, and probably has many cases to deal with. Once she realized they had made a mistake, she did rectify the situation. But blaming me for their SNAFU? Maybe working in that system has affected her perspective, or it's just CYA syndrome, but it is clear as clear to me that the very first thing I would do in her place is to apologize for having made a profound mistake. Beyond that, I would hope that I would make every effort to be sure I was on solid ground before I grabbed some citizen’s hard-earned money without warning.
This experience has not turned me into a Republican, but it does make me worry about the power of government bureaucracies and the arrogance they can breed. And considering that our credit union deposit is earning essentially zero percent right now, I'm thinking that a fire-safe cash box under the bed might be just a little bit safer. Because as I learned yesterday, they can find your money and they will take it if they have a mind to, for whatever reason.