What sort of business are you in, W2 income or do you (also) run a business?
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.
It’s not clear: did you try to voluntarily pay a Use tax?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
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.