My BRZ went like on BaT today - Wish me luck!

[Sapphireho]

Originally Posted by Tcoat

Oh I miss those days!
"Here is my receipt for $750 for my 58 Ford please give me my plates"
Here in Ontario they now have a reference library of values. Try to hand them a receipt for too little (according to that list) they are either going to make you pay taxes on the base price listed or get the car appraised to prove it is worth less than that. Of course they don't give you a reduced rate if you tell them it is higher than their list says it should be.

I got away with saying I only paid half what I actually paid for my last car. Got lucky and had a doc with proof of transfer without numbers, so didn't have to show sales invoice. Saved me a couple grand. Normally I'm not one for breaking the rules, but some states are out of control with taxes, and they spend what they get very unwisely.

[extrashaky]

Originally Posted by ocbrz66

A single anecdote I know but it gives flys in the face of other posters here that seem to think that they're going to throw you in the clink for having a Montana plate.

I never suggested they would throw you in jail. Tax offices are more insidious than that.

What they do instead is declare that you owe them taxes and penalties and send you a letter demanding you pay it. If you ignore it, or they sent the demand to an old address so you don't even know about it, they enter a judgment against you for a tax lien.

Once that happens, they go to work finding your bank accounts. And they CAN find them. Then they just take the money out of your account. By the time your bank mails you the lien notification, the money is already gone, and then it's up to you to fight to get it back if you didn't owe it. Either way, your account is suddenly shorter than you expected.

You say, "But! Due process! Fourth Amendment!" And they laugh and tell you that you got your due process when they sent the letter to your previous address that you never received. They don't even have to go to court to have a judgment entered against you.

If there's not enough in the bank to cover the lien, that judgment will come back to haunt you if you own property and try to sell it. Suddenly the tax office will be there taking a chunk of your proceeds to cover the lien. Tax liens are part of the search every real estate settlement agent does before closing on your sale, and the transaction can't close until it's resolved.

Some states might put a lien on the vehicle, but when Fairfax County in Virginia came after me they just stole it right out of my checking account. I got it back, but not without a fight and a delay of about four months. Your comment about the BRZ being a small fish made me laugh. The amount Fairfax said I owed was only $400 for vehicle registration. It cost them almost nothing to steal it from me. It's easy revenue, because most people don't even fight it.

At least I could fight mine. You'd just be screwed since you actually dodged the taxes. If you decided to hire legal representation to fight it, you'd run into problems there also. Attorneys don't like to take on tax liens because people who don't pay their taxes also tend to not pay their attorneys. You would end up paying more up front for a lawyer than if you just paid the taxes.

And the worst part of all is that the tax liens seem to come at you years after the actual debt. When Fairfax came after me, I hadn't lived in Virginia in years. Alabama did the same thing to me five years after I had moved away ($1300). Louisiana tried ($600), but somehow their notice that went to my old New Orleans address got forwarded to me in Texas even though my mail forwarding had expired, and I was able to call up and raise hell with them before it got to the point of stealing from my accounts.

So maybe you think you're selling this car now and will be out from under it, but that doesn't mean you will. You might. Or it might just be a ticking time bomb that years from now says "Poof!" and disappears money right out of your bank.

[JoeC]

Originally Posted by extrashaky

I never suggested they would throw you in jail. Tax offices are more insidious than that.

What they do instead is declare that you owe them taxes and penalties and send you a letter demanding you pay it. If you ignore it, or they sent the demand to an old address so you don't even know about it, they enter a judgment against you for a tax lien.

Once that happens, they go to work finding your bank accounts. And they CAN find them. Then they just take the money out of your account. By the time your bank mails you the lien notification, the money is already gone, and then it's up to you to fight to get it back if you didn't owe it. Either way, your account is suddenly shorter than you expected.

You say, "But! Due process! Fourth Amendment!" And they laugh and tell you that you got your due process when they sent the letter to your previous address that you never received. They don't even have to go to court to have a judgment entered against you.

If there's not enough in the bank to cover the lien, that judgment will come back to haunt you if you own property and try to sell it. Suddenly the tax office will be there taking a chunk of your proceeds to cover the lien. Tax liens are part of the search every real estate settlement agent does before closing on your sale, and the transaction can't close until it's resolved.

Some states might put a lien on the vehicle, but when Fairfax County in Virginia came after me they just stole it right out of my checking account. I got it back, but not without a fight and a delay of about four months. Your comment about the BRZ being a small fish made me laugh. The amount Fairfax said I owed was only $400 for vehicle registration. It cost them almost nothing to steal it from me. It's easy revenue, because most people don't even fight it.

At least I could fight mine. You'd just be screwed since you actually dodged the taxes. If you decided to hire legal representation to fight it, you'd run into problems there also. Attorneys don't like to take on tax liens because people who don't pay their taxes also tend to not pay their attorneys. You would end up paying more up front for a lawyer than if you just paid the taxes.

And the worst part of all is that the tax liens seem to come at you years after the actual debt. When Fairfax came after me, I hadn't lived in Virginia in years. Alabama did the same thing to me five years after I had moved away ($1300). Louisiana tried ($600), but somehow their notice that went to my old New Orleans address got forwarded to me in Texas even though my mail forwarding had expired, and I was able to call up and raise hell with them before it got to the point of stealing from my accounts.

So maybe you think you're selling this car now and will be out from under it, but that doesn't mean you will. You might. Or it might just be a ticking time bomb that years from now says "Poof!" and disappears money right out of your bank.

wow! that's crazy to hear that they can just take money right out of your accounts!

Am I reading correctly that this has happened to you multiple times???

[ocbrz66]

Suddenly your username makes a lot of sense lol.

I’m sure I’ll be ok, nothing will ever come of this. This is just your classic internet forum paranoia. Fun to read about and imagine but not even remotely based in reality.

[extrashaky]

I forgot to mention another unpleasant result of all this. A tax lien knocks about 100 points off your FICO score. That's not an insignificant change. Then when the lien is discharged, it hits your score again even though that's supposed to be a good thing that you no longer owe taxes. It takes about 18 months for the effect of the lien to be diminished. It takes six months for the hit from the discharge to drop off.

Originally Posted by JoeC

wow! that's crazy to hear that they can just take money right out of your accounts!

Am I reading correctly that this has happened to you multiple times???

Yep. Twice. I have moved around more than most during my adult life chasing better jobs and have lived in several states. I learned the hard way from Virginia to make sure you actually call and close out your auto registrations when you move to another state, because the old state conveniently won't know about your new registration and will just assume that you stopped paying them. Virginia simply decided I owed them money even though my car was legally and properly registered in Alabama and raped my checking account for it. The whole thing was a scam to get money out of former residents, most of whom wouldn't bother fighting it.

The problem in Alabama was an income tax lien. After finishing school in Alabama I moved for work in Tennessee, which doesn't have a personal income tax. For some reason my idiot employer reported my Tennessee income to Alabama, so Alabama just decided on their own that I earned the money in Alabama and owed them income tax on it. All the notifications went to an address in Alabama, years after the forwarding had expired.

They somehow found my brokerage account and stole $1300 from it. When I tried to get it back, they said I'd have to prove I paid income tax in Tennessee, which I didn't because TN doesn't have an income tax. The two idiot women I dealt with had both never heard of a state with no income tax. I spoke with an attorney, but he said it would cost more to get it back than to just let the fuckers have it. So that's $1300 of my hard earned money gone to a corrupt state government.

Louisiana was a different bit of idiocy altogether. When I moved to Texas, I called and spoke with someone at the DMV who said I didn't have to do anything to close out my account with them, just make sure I registered in the new state. Then, about six months later, I got a letter from LA telling me I owed them $600 for failure to maintain insurance.

When I called to find out what the hell they were on about, they said that when I registered my cars in Texas and moved my insurance there, my insurance company sent them a letter to let them know that I no longer had insurance in Louisiana, which they took to be a dropped coverage letter. My insurance company said they were required by the state to send those letters even if the insurance coverage was continuous in the next state.

Somehow the LA people couldn't understand this. I got locked into this weird Kafka-esque circular conversation with the Louisiana DMV clerk where she insisted that I couldn't clear it until I proved that I had Louisiana insurance, but I couldn't get Louisiana insurance because I wasn't a resident of Louisiana. And she said that I didn't owe the money since I was no longer a Louisiana resident, but she couldn't clear it out until it was paid. And if it wasn't cleared out, they would put a lien against me and try to collect from any assets they could identify.

I finally said, "Okay, bottom line. You acknowledged that I don't owe it. I'm not going to pay it. So how do we clear this up?"

It took her supervisor, two weeks, another letter from LA and another week of wrangling over the second letter to finally get them to let it go.

So THAT is why OP is playing with fire. With their bloated budget and tax shortfalls in California, they will be coming after tax cheats if they can find a way to identify them.

[soundman98]

so the moral of the story is "don't move"

[ocbrz66]

Originally Posted by Tcoat

Oh I miss those days!
"Here is my receipt for $750 for my 58 Ford please give me my plates"
Here in Ontario they now have a reference library of values. Try to hand them a receipt for too little (according to that list) they are either going to make you pay taxes on the base price listed or get the car appraised to prove it is worth less than that. Of course they don't give you a reduced rate if you tell them it is higher than their list says it should be.

Here in CA they will use book value unless you sweet talk them and convince them the car needs a lot of work and so the value was a lot lower.

“The car reeks of cat pee and the engine is blown, guy practically gave it away” boom a 25k car becomes a 1k car.

We can also do registration at AAA here and since they aren’t state employees they could not care less about getting more money for the state.

[ocbrz66]

@extrashaky. Maybe you’re just bad luck. I moved from west Monroe to CA many years ago, drove my car with expired LA plates for years with 0 issues. If the dmv extradites me I hope they do it during crawfish season.

[Tcoat]

Originally Posted by ocbrz66

Here in CA they will use book value unless you sweet talk them and convince them the car needs a lot of work and so the value was a lot lower.

“The car reeks of cat pee and the engine is blown, guy practically gave it away” boom a 25k car becomes a 1k car.

We can also do registration at AAA here and since they aren’t state employees they could not care less about getting more money for the state.

No sweet talking here. If that is the value listed you either prove it is wrong or pay up.

[ocbrz66]

Originally Posted by Tcoat

No sweet talking here. If that is the value listed you either prove it is wrong or pay up.

In VT you could go to any used car dealer and have them “appraise” the car. Almost everyone had a friend who would write a $500 appraisal.

The AAA thing is a game changer. You’re dealing with someone who wants to sell you vacation planning and not a pissed off DMV employee. Makes convincing someone that your new car is a POS a lot easier.

[extrashaky]

Originally Posted by ocbrz66

Maybe you’re just bad luck.

It's not bad luck. It's being an outlier and not fitting into the expected pattern. Government, business and social processes have evolved for the vast majority of people who tell themselves they're special but really just do the same things for the most part that everybody else does. When you reject the pattern and do something different, you run into issues like this where the established systems punish you for it and try to steer you back toward more acceptable choices.

Registering your car to an LLC in Montana is also outside the expected pattern. It's a nail sticking up that will get hammered down when it gets enough attention. People driving flashy cars with Montana plates tends to attract the kind of attention you don't want.

[maslin]

Originally Posted by extrashaky

Registering your car to an LLC in Montana is also outside the expected pattern. It's a nail sticking up that will get hammered down when it gets enough attention. People driving flashy cars with Montana plates tends to attract the kind of attention you don't want.

That flashy BRZ is going to bring the whole scheme down!













That last one really gets me, it's Bijan. They may actually have a castle tucked back in Montana though, you never know.

Also funny that the majority of the plates are from small counties. The first one or two numbers is county the car is registered in, counting up based on population from a census many years ago. Big number = small county.

4 is Missoula County, where the MyMontanaLLC guy is. 7 is Flathead County, Flathead and Whitefish are up there. Plenty of wealthy people "keep a home" on the lake to get the same advantages without any of the LLC backdoor system.

[MJones_RB]

Originally Posted by maslin

I see a Bugatti on the street, my first thought is "money laundering." I mean, how else?

[maslin]

Originally Posted by MJones_RB

I see a Bugatti on the street, my first thought is "money laundering." I mean, how else?

Bijan is how else. The "most expensive store in the world".

https://www.gq.com/story/house-of-bi...-paul-manafort



Also, "Six of Montana’s 56 counties do not collect a local option vehicle tax: Big Horn, Deer Lodge, Flathead, Granite, Phillips and Richland."

46 is Granite, 7 is Flathead. Explains the popularity of those two.