‘Horrific’ typo valued Wasatch County home at almost $1B
deseret.com
deseret.com
The problem was that when the title company recorded the sale, the person entering the data added an extra zero to the sale price, and the IRS thought I had sold it for $1.5 million! Luckily the IRS was very easy to deal with and gave me a few months to resolve the issue, and the title company was able to fix the records.
He told them that if they provided him with the account info that earned that much interest that it owed thousands of dollars in taxes, he would happily pay including penalties.
Turns out it was an off by one error in a SSN
That is an oddly specific explanation for the error, I guess the phone dropping incident must have been an especially memorable incident that year.
My cat loves to sit on my nice warm laptop keyboard and type things in. I am always having to revert her code changes.
In case anyone ever wonders, this is why I use rebase!
https://www.syracuse.com/news/2017/07/one_mans_huge_lottery_...
Surely the most likely ways for a house price to jump is a corporate relocation (land newly within a city/town), subdivision, or further building on the same land.. all three of those would have associated records to justify a jump
Sales taxes are regressive and inhibit economic activity. Property taxes target accumulated wealth and incentivize the most efficient use of real property.
The connection between sales taxes and public goods and services is a lot more tenuous.
"Orthodox propagandizing from economics" has come up with some things that you might not immediately think of when reasoning from first principles.
[Replying to dead comment]
Actually, yes. Property taxes are paid for by the people best able to afford the tax.
And with property taxes, its easier to catch errors and errors are individualized, meaning that the error is easier to correct once found. After all, this one was caught, and corrected, quite easily.
Further to note: it was inappropriate for the related jurisdictions to use the erroneous property tax numbers as the basis for their budgets without first vetting the numbers. A jump in the property tax base that large should have triggered an automatic audit.
I like the idea (and it's not new) of taxing the unimproved value of the land (because taxing it can't decrease the amount) and not taxing the improvements (because it's to everyone's benefit to improve property and you don't want to discourage that). If I was made dictator of San Francisco, that's what I'd try.
You're against property taxes because a clerk might make a typo somewhere? That's an oddly specific phobia.
not just a typo, but a mis-valuation. If no money is exchanged, the value of the property is indeterminate.
And i also don't like taxing wealth - after all, that wealth was already taxed when you used your existing money to purchase it. If the land is making an income, then by all means tax such an income. If you sell the land, and make a gain, then tax the gains (commonly refered to as capital gains). But to tax existing wealth just because you have it is ass backwards.
That's separate from income taxes, because that can be justified by the principle that being part of civilization provides a multiplier.
Here in Texas, there is a sales tax of 6.25% when you sell a car. They found that people were doing stuff like saying they sold their car to their neighbor for $100 so that the neighbor would have to pay 6.25% of $100 instead of 6.25% of $2500. And maybe the neighbor agrees to some untraceable off-the-record compensation like painting your house for you. There's an incentive to create this kind of deal because neither party loses money to taxes, benefiting both.
So realizing they were losing out on revenue, the state changed the law and created something called Standard Presumptive Value. Some method exists to look at comparable cars to estimate the value of a car (based on model, mileage, etc.). Now you pay 6.25% on the actual sale price or the SPV, whichever is higher.
Sometimes the car is in worse than average condition (not running, wrecked, etc.), and the SPV is too high, and yes, there's a procedure for that involving a professional appraisal.