Some of you may have recently done what I just did: Pay my property taxes.
This is always a fun occasion that rolls around every Dec. 10, especially when you do what I did last year, which is forget that it was Dec. 10.
Don’t do this. Because it makes your average county official very, very cranky, and even if your payment is a single minute late, you’ll get hit with a 10% penalty.
Now, as some of you know, I had chemotherapy once upon a time, along with high-dose radiation and then immunotherapy that killed some cancer but also my thyroid gland.
This is the excuse I use for the fact that I have CRS disease, also known as “Can’t Remember, um, Stuff.”
That’s why it’s possible for me to wake up on Dec. 10, remember that it is Dec. 10 and I owe my taxes, and still end my day having forgotten to do it. Someone needs to invent a reminder app that will actually come on and shout at you if you’re about to miss important deadlines, (like happy hour at your favorite bar). Don’t you agree?
Anyway, I paid the late taxes with the 10% penalty, which was around $500, bemoaning the fact that it was actually enough to fly to Paris in the off season. My stupidity cost me a flight to Paris.
You can actually appeal your penalty — which I did — but I never got any response at all from the county tax collector’s office, not even a denial. Our tax dollars at work.
This year, fortunately, I got up, walked into the elegant office cubby I share with my dining room, sat down and paid the taxes. Whew. Done.
But the subject of taxes reminded me of what happened when my rancher father died about a dozen years ago. I was executor of his (very small) estate, and dutifully filed tax returns for the closing of his Colorado cattle ranch, which, allow me to point out, is in Colorado. Which is not and never has been part of California.
Since it was a family farm, naturally it never actually made any money, so it was easy to get the returns filed and we didn’t owe anything.
But try telling that to the Franchise Tax Board. The fine people who run the California state income tax system.
A few months after I’d closed up everything on my dad’s estate, I got a letter addressed to my dad, to my home address. It came from the Franchise Tax Board, and it demanded $800 or so, claiming it had estimated that was the amount of money my dad owed the state of California.
Now, my dad was an eccentric hermit rancher on the Colorado prairie, and the only place he ever went was to the bingo games at his Veterans of Foreign Wars lodge. He was the caller. He hadn’t set foot in California in at least 50 years, and he certainly had no income here.
I wrote back to the Franchise Tax Board and explained this, and figured that would solve the problem. You’re shaking your heads right now, aren’t you?
Well, if so, you are correct, because they never responded to my letter in any way, but they did send me another bill a few months later, adding fictitious interest and fictitious penalties to their fictitious taxes due.
It occurred to me that maybe if this bill were received by a bookkeeper or lawyer who didn’t know any better, maybe it would just get paid, and the state of California would be guilty of fraud. Or something like that (you lawyers out there could tell me).
I didn’t bother to reply any more, since they never answered me and I thought that was rude. I just let them keep sending me demand letters addressed to my dead father until the fake interest and penalties reached thousands of dollars.
Then, the letters just stopped. I don’t know why. I would like to say I missed them, but I’d be lying. It was just a taxing question.
We had a few other mysteries that hung on after our father’s demise, including what he did with the will he’d had drawn up only a few months before. We never found it and his lawyer didn’t have it. And what happened to our dad’s gold, which we didn’t even know existed until our uncle told us they’d each inherited a stash of gold bars from their father. We never found it, either. despite looking through all the local banks for a safe deposit box.
As to the lovely Franchise Tax Board and its fictitious statements, if this has ever happened to you, I’d definitely be interested in knowing about it. Email me at [email protected].
And happy December.
