Yesterday’s “fun with debtholders” reminded me of an incident just after we were married. My Patient Husband used to live in another state, and he still had a bank account there. We received a notice at our residence in Angeltown from his home state that we owed on our tax bill, and they were NOT HAPPY with us in that special way that only the government can be. They threatened dire legal action if we did not pay the entire debt as outlined in the enclosed: $15.
It wasn’t the amount of money that upset me (although in those days, fifteen bucks was big) but the fact that there was no enclosed form. It looked like a property tax thing, and $15 was more than the interest he’d earned on that account in the entire year. Worse, was he supposed to be filing state tax in his home state? Because for years now, he hadn’t. This wasn’t cool.
My Patient Husband worked full time but I didn’t, so I got on the phone with his home state and asked for clarification.
Their “clarification” consisted of insisting that I must pay this money. I indicated I would be happy to do so if they’d tell me what it was for, and if he needed to be filing taxes in the first place. No one could answer this. I got escalated to a supervisor who said, “This is tax on your motorhome. You need to pay the taxes for that.”
I may be remembering the details wrong, but that was the essence. There was some sort of motorhome tax that we had been delinquent in paying on the grounds that we did not own a motorhome in his home state.
I pointed this out, and she was insistent: I was a bad American if I didn’t pay my fifteen dollars. Again, I repeated we owned no property in home state. She said we did. I said we didn’t even live there (after all, hadn’t she called me back at an area code she’d never heard of before?) She snapped back to insisting we owned property in homestate even if we didn’t live there. Then she said, “Well what do you own here? A motorcycle maybe?”
No, I think I’d remember owning SOMETHING in a state I don’t live in.
She got more strident that I had to pay. So I finally sighed and said, “You win. Repossess it.”
Dead silence on her end of the phone.
I said, “Just drive on out to the motorhome and repossess it. I’m not going to pay. It’s yours. Enjoy it.”
She said, a little forlornly, “But it’s only fifteen dollars.”
I said, “Sell it and keep the profits. I don’t care.”
Light dawned. “You mean it’s really not yours?”
Two hours later, someone high up the food chain in the home state (probably not the Governor, but maybe the Tax Poobah) called me, moderately amused, apologizing for the mixup. Someone had not paid on a motorhome, and his tax ID number was one digit off from Patient Husband, whom they’d somehow managed to track down a thousand miles away.
The Poobah concluded, “I don’t even know why they bothered. They’re not supposed to try to collect on something under twenty bucks.”
And so, somewhere in the hinterlands of home state, lives a guy who embodies the values of the French Revolution: Life, Liberty, and a state government in pursuit of property tax.
That is the most excellent retort ever. I wish I was that quick on my feet.
“You win. Repossess it.” is going to become my response to all sorts of unreasonable situations!
I’m not that quick at all, actually. We’d been going in circles for five minutes at that point.
I understand that some people are going to try to evade their taxes, but if I’m saying I don’t own the property in question, that’s pretty clear. Not, “It used to belong to my uncle and he only willed it to me when he died,” but “We own nothing in the state of Confusion.”
So yeah, not quickness but desperation. And if the power company harasses me about unpaid bills over at 95 Deadbeat Road, I will tell them to turn off the power there too, because I don’t live there. 😉
Oh, wow, credit collectors and their ilk are a special breed! My husband moved up to Chicago a few years ago, and was told by the gas company that “we can’t turn on your gas because you haven’t paid your bills.” They claim he moved to Chicago and rented an apartment (which is in a luxury apartment building downtown) when he was like 16. Uh, sure. Poor Josh had to scream and plead with them to get rid of the bill, and swore up and down that no, he didn’t rent an apartment by himself. Idiots, the lot of them!
HA! That’s wonderful! What a perfect response. I’m glad you were able to think of that during the conversation, instead of AFTER (which is what I usually do.) State of Confusion indeed!