Inaction, Redux

To follow up on this posting, the state in which my wife works, but in which we do not reside, finally deigned to issue a refund check.

The problem? It was less than 25% of what it should have been. In fact, it was closer to 5% of what it should have been!

Now for years, either my wife or I have worked in this state. We always pay money at the end of the year to the state we reside in and get money back from the other state. The percentages paid and the percentages refunded have been consistently the same for well over twenty years.

For the past few years my wife has worked in that state, but fewer and fewer days per week. She now averages one day a week working out of state, the rest in our resident state. So we've gotten more back as a refund.

Obviously the tax idiots in that state made a mistake. You would have thought that a change in the tax laws, which would affect more than us, would have caused some notice either in the people who do the returns or the government. I recall more than one occasion when that other state proposed changes for how they tax non-resident works and the amount of sparks that it caused in the halls of government in adjacent states. So I am pretty sure there were no legislative changes!

Now the fun is going to be in getting them to (a) admit they made a mistake; (b) getting them to correct their mistake; and (c) issuing a correct refund. Will we actually see our money before it is time to file 2008 taxes?