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State zombie tax notices

April 25, 2011

There are few things more annoying a tax agency ignoring you when you respond to a client notice. It apparently isn't just happening to me. Brian Strahle notices the same thing:

I don't know about you, but I am seeing a lot more state tax notices being received by companies. Not only are they first time notices, but they are repeat notices, month after month. This is even after the taxpayer/company has responded to the first notice.
It often feels like the state taxing authority never looked at the response sent by the company. Actually, I recently called a state taxing authority because a company received a repeat notice, and the state said they were probably six months behind on processing incoming responses/mail, etc. Therefore, the company would continue to receive a repeat notice every month until the company's initial response was processed.

That's pathetic. If you can't process your mail, you should stop generating notices until you catch up. Otherwise you just squander taxpayer money generating notices you can't even deal with, and you squander the taxpayer's money and time by making them respond to zombie notices.

Fair's fair. When state agencies ignore taxpayer responses, we should be able to impose penalties on them, just like they impose on us if we ignore them.

Tags: Brian Strahle.state tax policy.