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CJ vs. the California State Franchise Tax Board

Courtney J Holmes & Barbara M Moore
Santa Rosa, CA
(707) xxx-xxxx
3 August, 2006
Re: Account xxxxxxxxxx

Franchise Tax Board
PO Box 942867
Sacramento CA 94267-0011

To Whom It May Concern,

I am writing in response to your correspondence on 07/28/06 regarding the status of my tax payments. Phrases such as "FINAL NOTICE" and "This is your final demand for payment." gave it such a sense of urgency that I chose to reply immediately, rather than waiting for it to age properly before responding. And, let's face it, the great state of California is not a power to be ignored, especially when it threatens to "begin collection actions without further notice to you." Allowing the notice to sit untended for even a few days gives me the the kind of thrill I can not get from pursuits such as skydiving or hang gliding, because my wife does not permit me to engage in such activities. She much prefers my presence to my copious life insurance, bless her heart. But back to business.

The total due on 07/28/06 was $3186.20.

What puzzled me was that I had a specific memory of paying my state taxes for 2005. When I filed my taxes I tried to set up an installment plan, but something must have gone wrong because it didn't "take". After a suitable period of time I received notice that my taxes were past due along with the
very strong suggestion that I should pay them forthwith. I confess to allowing the letter to age a little, a couple of weeks for my personal enjoyment, then paid the balance of $3150.22 using the online payment system. The amount I paid included penalties and interest, which is not unexpected when you stiff the Great State of California however unintentionally. According to my bank statement the money was withdrawn on 07/07/2006. I freely admit that I was careless and did not save my transaction number.

Here we get to the crux of the matter. Having already paid the State a great deal of money I was determined not to pay it again, at least not without further salvos of letters containing ever-escalating and more-dire threats of collections and assorted legal actions. So I called the number on the notice, spent some quality time with the automated call-routing system featuring a lovelier-than-usual female voice, was able to obtain my balance.

My balance as of today is $10.00.

The lovely automated female voice informed me that payments may take 45 days to process. "Aha!" I said to myself, "That explains the notice." I presume the ten dollar balance is the interest between my first notice and when my payment was applied. While I am happy not to owe the Great and
Threatening State of California ever-increasing amounts of money, I am tempted to withhold the remaining ten dollars to eek out a few more grams of adrenalin from the whole experience. My wife, ever disapproving even my lamest attempts at thrill-seeking, insists we send the money right away.
Please find enclosed our check for ten dollars.

So here's my question. If it takes 45 days to process my ten dollar payment, am I going to be charged further interest and penalty fees? A month and a half is a long time, more than enough for the Great Interest Bearing State of California to decide I owe just a little more money. If executed properly you could turn minor balances into major cash flows, a fact not lost on credit card companies. Will I be trapped in a never-ending cycle of ever-smaller balances coupled with escalating legal language? Or will you add huge penalties as well, tacking your $126.00 "collection fee" onto the seventeen cents of interest? Will my wages be garnished? Will my home be taken from me?

It would be nice if, after you receive and process my payment, you could send me some kind of notice or statement or something to let me know if I'm paid in full. As much as I enjoy our little correspondences, it all has to end somewhere. But don't be too sad about it, we'll see each other next year. I promise.

Sincerely,

CJ Holmes

Enclosures: Check #902 for $10.
cc: 2005 Sate Tax Folder

Oh, that Lon!

Was just catching up on a little savagebeatdown, and came across Lon's Letters, which I haven't read in quite a while. He's quite a story teller - read Letter to Zaggy and In A Bind.

CJ vs. Wells Fargo

Like a lot of people, back in 2003 we refinanced our home to get a super-low interest rate. E*Trade sold the loan to Wells Fargo, who immediately claimed we were missing payments. Here's CJ's letter to Wells Fargo.

Wells Fargo Home Mortgage Inc.
PO Box 14543
Des Moines IA 50306-3543
Fax: (612)312-3905

Date: 14 August 2003

Courtney J Holmes
Barbara M. Moore
Acct# 0xxxxxxxxx

To whom it may concern:

This is a followup to our letter on 12 August 2003, regarding the apparent non-receipt of our mortgage payments for the months of June and July.

Our bank statement for the month of July arrived yesterday, and we have discovered that you did in fact receive the payments. However, you rejected the checks because of an invalid account number. The first of these checks was returned on the 14th of July, a turnaround time of 26 days. The second check was returned on the 29th day of July, which represents a more acceptable turnaround time of only 8 days. As the statement wasn't mailed until three days ago, I think you will understand why we didn't know sooner that our checks were being rejected.

Date	Ref#	Amount	Return Date
20 June 2003	xxxx-xxxx	$1287.89	14 July 2003
21 July 2003	xxxx-xxxx	$1287.89	29 July 2003

The "invalid account number" that we used was, in fact, the correct account number but without a leading zero.

Account number we used:	xxxxxxxxx
"Correct" account number:	0xxxxxxxxx
Equivalent representation of the same number:	0000000000xxxxxxxxx

As most grade school graduates know, a leading zero in front of a number does not change its numerical value. If the missing zero had been at the end of the number, then the confusion would have been understandable. As it is, I am deeply concerned about your information systems. Perhaps your computer programmers did not attend the same kind of grade school that I did. Or perhaps your database administrators are uncommonly young and have not finished their primary education. Or maybe the people who receive checks into your system simply don't care much for basic arithmetic. Whatever the cause, it is distressing that a respected multi-billion-dollar company such as Wells Fargo, with over $1.5 billion in revenue last quarter alone, could be so numerically challenged as to think that two numbers are different just because one has a leading zero while the other does not. (As a side note, I didn't notice any leading zeroes anywhere in the quarterly statement.)

What is also strange is that you held the first of these checks for a full 20 days or more, and was unable to match it to our account. This is in spite of the fact that my name and address appear at the top of these checks in the usual place, and that this address matches both my mailing address and the address of the property in question. So not only was the account number not recognized, but it appears nobody even attempted to find the correct account through other means.

Once I realized what had happened I set out at once to investigate where the leading zero got lost. Our loan was originated by E*Trade Mortgage Corporation, and it was they who sold the loan to Wells Fargo. When they sold the loan they sent us a nice letter, no doubt required by law, informing us of the fact complete with payment information. In this letter the account number has no leading zero. Being the responsible person that I am, I immediately set up a recurrent payment with my internet bill payment system, carefully copying the account number I was given.

I have not taken the time to research further, as it would require hours on the phone with people at E*Trade who would not understand why a customer would want to trace the origins of account numbers. But I have two theories:

(1) E*Trade received my account number already shorn of it's leading zero, perhaps from one of your better-educated employees.

(2) E*Trade received my account number with the leading zero intact, but dropped it somewhere along the way. This might have happened as a result of either human or machine intervention, as either might have believed the little bugger to be insignificant.

Regardless of where the fault may lie, we still owe you this money and I am sending both payments today. To avoid confusing your staff, I have prepended a zero to the account number. However, we still want you to provide a written statement indicating that our account is not now, nor has it ever been, delinquent or overdue. Finally, if you have reported our account as delinquent or overdue to any credit-reporting agency, please have them correct the mistake immediately and notify us when this action is complete.

Sincerely,

Courtney J Holmes

Consumer Affairs

Cleaning out my email today, I found this letter written by my husband, CJ Holmes. This is one of many letters he has written to big business...

Frito Lay Consumer Affairs
P.O. Box 660634
Dallas, TX 75266-0634

18 April 2004

To whom it may concern,

I have long doubted stories of the "things found in my junk food" variety. However, I may be far less skeptical after today's encounter with a bag of Frito-Lay's Nacho Cheesier® Doritos® brand tortilla chips. This was part of a large "12-sack" my wife purchased to help fill out our son's lunch boxes for school over the next couple of weeks.

We have two children ages 3 and 6 who, being children, greeted the sight of a brand-new huge red bag full of smaller red bags of nutritionally void cheesy snacks with instant hunger. We gave them each one of the little bags and sent them on their merry, now cheesier, way.

About two minutes later our 3 year old daughter presented us with "a yucky thing from the chips". It was in fact so yucky that it frightened my wife who, without touching it, immediately scooped it back into the bag from whence it came. Like most Americans she was exposed to the traditional cannon of urban legends in her teen years, so her chief concern was that it might be the fried remnants of a rodent or rodent-like creature. As the man of the house, I was summoned to investigate.

As you can see from the picture, it is a moderately disgusting item. It is so thoroughly fried that it's origins are not easily perceived, although its color is suggestive of fried skin covered with cheesy Doritos® flavoring. Viewing the thing from different angles suggests different possibilities. Maybe it is simply a clump of spices and dough that found its way in to the batch of chips. Perhaps we have been lucky enough to recover an item of clothing lost by one of your employees. You may have a serious pest problem. Or maybe the urban legends are true, and your facilities are occasionally used by hired killers to dispose of their victims.

Whatever it is made of, it is quite gross and we're returning it to you. It is our hope that you have something akin to a Forensic Nutritionist on staff who can properly identify it and give it a proper burial if that's what is needed.

No no, there's no need to thank us. We're just doing our bit to keep America's food supply safe in these trying times.

Best Wishes,

CJ Holmes

A couple weeks later we received Frito-Lay's response: four 35 cent coupons for the Frito-Lay product of our choice.