I received a notice last week that I hadn’t paid the tax for my company and I owed $70 in penalties. This had me fuming mad because I had a copy of the check I sent in March and the check was included in my tax return; how did the state process the tax return to know how much I owed without seeing the check? I called the Franchise Tax Board on Friday and spoke to a representative that said he’d send a note for the returns people to look for it (the check hadn’t been cashed) and he’d give me a call back. Today is Tuesday and I never heard from him, so I called back. The problem with calling back is that the automated system wouldn’t let me wait on hold because the system was too bogged down. So, 10 or so calls later, I got put on hold and then transferred to someone. The lady said that I needed to stop payment on the check (she didn’t bother looking up my account), fax in a copy of the stop payment and send a new check. She didn’t bother giving me the fax number.
I started looking at stopping payment on the check and sending all the stuff to the state. My bank wants $20 to stop payment on the check. So now that the state lost my check (I did send it), I’ll be out $20 and hours of my time trying to resolve this issue. I’m going to call back tomorrow to find out if they found my check and what they’ll do about covering the $20 stop payment fee. How can the government be so incompetent?