
‘Horrific’ typo valued Wasatch County home at almost $1B - Someone
https://www.deseret.com/utah/2019/12/5/20997681/horrific-wasatch-county-error-valued-home-for-nearly-1-billion-now-taxpayers-may-have-to-pay-more
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jjwiseman
Years ago I sold a property I owned for about $150,000. Then one day, probably
about two years later, I got a letter from the IRS. It was a notice that I
owed hundreds of thousands of dollars in back taxes, and that I had 30 days
before they would begin to take money out of my bank accounts (a bank levy).

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.

~~~
vidanay
A friend of mine once received a letter from the IRS demanding several
thousand dollars in unpaid taxes on interest earned from a bank account of
some type.

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

~~~
labster
Gosh. Imagine if SSN included a checksum, and were not just issued
sequentially. Instead we get a reminder that all this is really random, and if
your soul had been born 50 milliseconds earlier you too could have been rich
enough to owe thousands in taxes on a single account.

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bryanrasmussen
"That error — which the Wasatch County assessor explained possibly occurred
when a staff member may have dropped their phone on their keyboard — has
resulted in a countywide overvaluation of more than $6 million and revenue
shortfalls in five different Wasatch County taxing entities"

That is an oddly specific explanation for the error, I guess the phone
dropping incident must have been an especially memorable incident that year.

~~~
Stratoscope
They should be grateful they didn't hire _me_ for that job.

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!

~~~
masonic
How do we know whether this was written by you or the cat, then?

~~~
Stratoscope
That should be easy. My speling is better than herz!

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jay_kyburz
Today I learned that a random clerk can make a typo that is only picked up
months later and has significant costs impacts on the area. I wonder what
would happen if the clerk made the mistake in the other direction many times
over.

~~~
Spooky23
There are lots of obscure events that can do this. A few years ago a New York
school district lost a few million dollars of aid because of a lottery winner
tipping some state aid threshold.

~~~
Aloha
452,000 it appears.

[https://www.syracuse.com/news/2017/07/one_mans_huge_lottery_...](https://www.syracuse.com/news/2017/07/one_mans_huge_lottery_win_costs_cny_school_district_452000_in_aid_district_says.html)

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outside1234
If only there were a way to do automated validation checks...

~~~
crooked-v
In this case even a simple sanity check, like 'automatically flag homes with
10x the median average value for an extra manual review', would have caught
the problem.

~~~
gnabgib
The house has been around since 1978 (and presumably annually taxed). Flagging
houses that have 3000x in value would have caught this.. but even 1.5x seems
reasonable.

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

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zmix
Oh, another Buttle/Tuttle!

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chii
this is why i'm against property tax. I m all for a sales tax - because a sale
reveals the true value of a property, and thus can tax it accurately.

~~~
gamblor956
Ironically, this is why I support a property tax but not a sales tax.

Sales taxes are regressive and inhibit economic activity. Property taxes
target accumulated wealth and incentivize the most efficient use of real
property.

~~~
Gibbon1
If one ignores the orthodox propagandizing from economists. You end up with
the unremarkable idea that the value of ordinary property is based mostly on
the amount of public goods and services tied to it. Which are paid for and
maintained by the state. Stands to reason that state should then impose a
property tax to pay for all that.

The connection between sales taxes and public goods and services is a lot more
tenuous.

~~~
iudqnolq
One example of a clear connection between a sales tax and public goods and
services is a gas tax. It doesn't work perfectly, especially given advances in
vehicle efficiency and electric vehicles, but it used to pretty reliably
charge people for road maintenance based on their usage. It was also a
regressive tax, because poorer people spend more of their income on purchases
like gas.

"Orthodox propagandizing from economics" has come up with some things that you
might not immediately think of when reasoning from first principles.

