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.
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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???
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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.