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March 18, 2008

You can fight City Hall and win; I just did

Updated throughout, with a new ending.

Saturday -- when I couldn't do a thing about it -- the mailman brought a dreaded letter from City Hall, the one marked on the back in huge type,

Important!
Tax bill enclosed
Open Immediately

This is never good news. Sure enough, inside,

City of Providence
Delinquent Real Estate Tax Notice

TAX BILL IS NOW PAST DUE
Payment in full is now required. Included with this 2007 bill is an interest penalty of 9%. The interest will continue to accrue at an additional 1% per month until the balance is paid in full. If you fail to make payment by March 28, 2008 your property may be subject to an upcoming Tax Sale scheduled for August, 2008. An additional Tax Sale cost charge (Minimum of $300.00) will be added to the total amount due.

No explanation, just a bill for a coupla thousand bucks and change, now due March 28.

I do all my banking online. I schedule my quarterly real-estate tax payments to be sent by the bank directly to the city.

Fuming, unable to get any information till Monday, I went online and verified that three of the year's four payments had been sent, and cashed. The fourth is due next month.

I would blind them with documentation. But I had to know exactly what the problem was before I appeared in person. I didn't want to have to negotiate the bureaucracy twice.

Yesterday morning, I called the phone number on the bill.

First time, I sat on hold for 15 minutes till I got the ringing signal that usually ends in a human voice. Instead it turned into that fast busy signal that won't stop.

I started over. After 15 more minutes the phone rang and was actually picked up. I could hear voices in the background, and pages riffling. Feeling pretty silly, I was shouting "Hallo-o-o-o," hoping someone would hear and speak to me. Nope. After 5 minutes of ambient office sounds, "click." Dead air.

Once more, and eventual success. I hadn't paid my third-quarter property-tax bill, the older woman's voice said.

"What about check number 5507 of Nov. 26?" I asked.

"We don't have a record of that one," she said.

"I'm looking at it online," I said. "You cashed it."

"Bring it down," she said.

I dug up my hard-copy monthly bank statement spanning late November and early December, which showed a small version of the canceled check. Online, at the bank site, I printed out a blowup of both sides of the check image, of my online bill-payment history filtered to show only City Collector, and took a screenshot of my ongoing balance statement showing that check 5507 had been sent Nov. 26 to arrive on the due date of Nov. 30, and was cashed and debited from my account on Dec. 11.

Armed with my bulletproof documentation, I marched on City Hall, smiling. (They must brace for angry taxpayers. I would be friendly, harmless, not expecting a fight, just straightening out a misunderstanding. I am here to dazzle them with bank records.)

After two lines, I got to a clerk who could see there was a problem. "Hold onto all this," she said, giving me back my sheaf of papers. "I'll have a supervisor look at it. Have a seat."

When the supervisor eventually came out, he said, "You pay bills online, so there's no hard copy, right?"

"No," I said, "The bank sent you a physical check."

"Oh. Was it cashed?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, "here it is reproduced on my monthly statement."

"It was cashed, then," he nodded.

"Yes, but the image is really tiny so I blew it up and printed both sides of the check out for you."

"Thank you for that," he said. "Let me look into it." And he left with my papers.

There in the row of chairs, my neighbors all clutched TAX BILL IS NOW PAST DUE notices. The man to my left had his canceled check, dated Sept. 7. The city didn't cash it till Dec. 12, and just now was dunning him for the late payment.

The newcomers to my right all had late payment notices, too. They had mailed them on time, they said, but they couldn't prove they had arrived on time. They were hoping to appeal for clemency and the benefit of the doubt. They didn't think it would work, though.

Finally, the supervisor returned.

"I found it. It was just a mistake," he said. "We credited your payment to someone else's motor-vehicle tax. They were probably together in a pile of mail, and the clerk mistakenly applied it to his account. Just a mistake."

Somewhere, there's somebody whose car tax bonanza is about to undergo a sudden deflation.

"I've credited you, and canceled the penalties. Here's your new tax bill. You can wait till April 24 to pay it."

I looked at the new bill. It's for $200 less than the quarterly payment already scheduled for April. Will I pay that amount? Not a chance. I've already spent two hours proving I paid my taxes.

Paying this amount will land me in that line again, waving that "Duplicate Tax Bill." I know it will.

And somebody will tell me I should have known the amount was wrong, no matter what the supervisor said.

Things didn't turn out so well for my neighbor on the chair line who showed his Sept. 7 check. The supervisor told him flatly they don't hold checks at City Hall for three months. (Just as they don't credit your payment to someone else's account?) This sad man must have asked someone else to mail it and they forgot. For three months. His entire tax bill for the year is now due, with interest. No recourse. (Fortunately, there's only one payment left, but he'll have to pay it a month early, and with that whopping interest, to boot.)

The lesson here: Pay your tax bills online, or in person, or mail your check very early.

Both the supervisor and I knew that if push came to shove, Citizens Bank held all the cards: They knew when they sent the check, when they debited it from my account; and they knew exactly when the city cashed it. At the top of the check is the lovely line, "Please post this payment for our mutual customer." My fallible human hands had never touched it.

Even City Hall didn't want to fight that. The supervisor caved at the sight of my indisputable paperwork. After seeing it, he just wanted to know what account they had misdirected my payment to.

Later: This is a "writethrough" -- a later version, slightly edited and augmented with additional material. To wit:

I live in writerly clutter, books and bills and bits of paper on most surfaces. There's a table at the end of the couch with a woven placemat and a reading lamp. On the mat is a little bit of mail serving as a coaster, protecting the table from the moisture of icy drinks as I read.

Turns out, the mail was the November bank statement with the photo of the tax check.

Not for the first time, the clutter served me well: Out of all the statements in all the envelopes over all the years, the single page I needed was under my nose.

Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 8:00 AM | Permalink

Comments

Posted by: the nag on March 18, 2008 6:14 PM

Posted by: Chris Young on March 19, 2008 1:34 PM