I received a notice in the mail today from my local tax collector noting the following:
At the bottom of the letter is a chart for figuring my tax owed based on my gross receipts collected for the years 2001 and 2002.
So, I’m thinking…huh?
First of all, since I know it’s the first question that people will ask, I live in PA.
Second, I do not own or run a business at this address, nor have I owned or run any type of business at any address, ever.
Third, I just moved into this house last November, and I have already received my yearly property/school tax bills and submitted them to my mortgage company for payment from my escrow account.
I’m assuming that this is all a mistake, but is anyone familiar with what these taxes are? As near as I can tell, they’re related to owning/running a business, and wouldn’t be payable by your average private citizen. Obviously, I’ll be calling the tax office tomorrow, but in the meantime, does anyone know how I could have been tagged as someone who has been avoiding business taxes? I don’t like the threat of collection proceedings. It’s all very odd.
My first thought is identity theft. Did the letter have your name/SSN? Did is name a business? If so, look in a year or 2 old phone book and see if you can find evidence such a business existed at one time.
My second thought is the previous resident ran a business out of your current location.
The letter did come to my name and mailing address (my home), and it does not contain my SSN that I can see. The letter is on behalf of my township/school district.
The house that I bought was empty for a year before I bought it, and before that, it was owned by some deadbeats who defaulted on their mortgage and the bank repossessed it. The neighbors have been pretty vocal about how much they disliked the previous occupants, but I’ve never heard them mention that they were running a business from here.
The identity theft thing didn’t occur to me…I’ll be sure to check it out after I talk to the tax office tomorrow. ::sigh::
Could be any number of things–a typo on the SSN when someone else was filling out a form, a typo by the clerk who was entering data from a form, a misread number by a scanner, etc.
I think the important thing is what the note says–that they are not doing anything immediately, and that you have thirty days to clear things up. The fact that they didn’t say “Pay up now, or else” or simply deducted the money from your bank account is common these days amongst tax collectors, in part to be courteous (yet firm) to the taxpayers, and in part because mistakes are made, by everyone involved in the process.
By all means, contact them first thing in the morning, and I imagine you’ll have it all straightened out in five minutes (just hope that PA’s computer systems are decent, and that you don’t have to make the same call five times over the next month).
