This is really taxing

We received a letter on Saturday telling us we owe back taxes to our local area tax office from tax year 2003. One problem: we didn't live here in 2003.

This letter did not surprise us. It is not the first time some part of the Pennsylvania bureaucracy has decided to see if they could "get us." I bet they get people this way all the time. There are so many different taxes we have to pay, people are probably quite willing to believe they missed one, and pay up. We have state income tax, local income tax, local school tax, local property tax, per capita tax, and occupational tax. All are paid separately. You can see how a person might get confused.

In 1997 we sold a house in Louisiana. The next day, we bought a house in PA. Two years later, the state told us we owed them tax on the money we made selling the house! We were able to show that we did not actually live in PA when we sold it, so we were off the hook for that one.

We moved from Hanover in 1999. We were told in late 2000 that we didn't pay our 1999 per capita tax in Hanover, a tax which isn't owed until after the date we had moved. They even sent us to a collection agency, despite our proving we didn't live there. The amount of the tax? Five dollars.

So now, our local tax bureau wants us to pay income tax for the year before we moved here. We moved into this house on February 29, 2004. We didn't even own the house until February 28. So how could we owe taxes for 2003? Obviously, we don't. But now I have to waste my time and energy digging up the contract for the house and the papers for the tax we paid in our other local area to prove that we don't.

How much money could the people of PA save every year if we just eliminated all this local bureaucracy? I bet just the postage on letters to people who don't actually owe any taxes would be hundreds of dollars a year.