State Sales And Use tax return

Factual Questions
1

Had a strange Situation with my sales tax return today.

I get two letters in the mail from the state DOR.

First letter (dated March 11):

You failed to pay your state tax, please enclose $XXXX to settle up.

Second Letter (dated March 12):

A check for the amount I apparently overpayed in sales tax.

Seems strange to me that the DOR completely flip flopped on my sales tax status over the course of 24 hours.

Should I contact them to see what’s going on?

This is only my second year filing a sales tax return, is this a normal occurance?

you are not my tax attorney, blah blah
Just looking for feedback to see if I should spend all day tomorrow on hold.

2

  1. Which state?

  2. What sort of business are you in, W2 income or do you (also) run a business?

  3. I would contact them, using the number found through Google and not printed on the letter. Such a letter may be legit, but I would get the official word.

  4. It’s not clear: did you try to voluntarily pay a Use tax?

  5. Without seeing the letters, and if #4 is true, it sounds like letter 1 reflects that they believe you probably made more online purchases than you claimed, and letter 2 means for the amount you claimed, a calculation or other error was made (by you or by them), and here’s a refund.

3

This. It’s possible that letter #1 could be from a scammer, but don’t count on it. Check it out in the manner suggested.

4

Here’s a few possibilities that come to my mind:
[A] They have you listed under two different account numbers. You overpaid on one account and the other shows no payment received at all.
** The refund is from 2015 Q3 and the demand for payment is for 2015 Q4.
[C] Your check got processed on March 11th, after they had already printed the first letter, and the check was for too much money.

Hell yes.

5

Definitely contact them. It could be as simple as two departments generating two letters at different times and maybe there’s no problem, but it could also be much more complicated.

6

I disagree. I think the OP should just shred the letters and pretend he never saw them. Nothing bad could possibly result from doing so. And even if it does, tell them **Dewey Finn **said that was the right thing to do.

7

Tell Messrs. Cheatem & Howe I said hello.

8

:confused::dubious: Is this a trick question?

thelurkinghorror nailed it in one: get their phone number from the internet (not from the docs you received in the mail) and give them a call.

9

It wouldn’t surprise me if these letters were generated by two different employees. My guess would be that the payment was posted a bit late (perhaps due to some backup in the office), just a bit after their program triggered the first letter.

If you have evidence showing you filed/paid for the given period, the first letter is moot.

10

Anyone interested in what happened?

So is the DOR :slight_smile:

My check cleared on Jan. 22.

The first letter had no business being made, (so possibly a scammer?)

The refund check is the real deal though

11

So how long did you spend on hold and how nice and/or knowledgeable was/wasn’t the person you talked to? Were you surprised?

12

I was pleasantly surprised! Probably spent 10 minutes total on hold. The person was nice, and knowledgable enough to give me a yes or no answer within one minute.

Overall I would give the State tax collectors two thumbs up. (that was a hard sentence to type!)

13

What kind of scam would this be? For people who will mail a check like anywhere?

14

Because it’s hard to type without using your thumbs?

15

Same as the telephone ones – scare someone with diminished faculties.

16

In response to an official-looking letter, yes. You’d be surprised what a significant fraction of the population that is. I know a law firm that was caught out by a related scam.

17

doesn’t even have to be official looking.
People seem more than willing to pay others for no good reason.
My wife and I get spam almost every day enclosing “invoices” as if we were businesses. The virus detectors flag all the attachments so far.

My father assured me that back in the day a popular idea was to put an ad in the paper saying in toto: “LAST CHANCE! send $5 to …” It got so bad that the US Postal Service defined the idea as a scam and arrested anyone picking up the payments.

I am sure that if one did the same thing on Facebook today you would be inundated with envelopes with $5 bills.