The 0.3% MVET that Sound Transit collects when registering vehicle tabs was accidentally collected for those living just outside of the Sound Transit district, the P-I reports:
More than $3 million in Sound Transit motor-vehicle excise taxes was wrongly collected from about 95,000 vehicle owners who lived outside the agency’s taxing district due to shortcomings of a computer program at a state agency, court testimony shows.
The taxes, which will be returned in the form of refunds, were collected between June 30, 2005, and July 1 of this year, according to court testimony by Sound Transit’s Chief Financial Officer Brian McCartan.
This is truly an embarrassing and unfortunate situation for Sound Transit to find itself in. To be clear, though, state agencies like the Department of Revenue and Department of Licensing are the ones who collect these taxes and presumably determine who should pay them — not ST. Sound Transit’s mission is to build transit and not collect taxes, after-all. All agencies at this point, however, should be working together to make sure this doesn’t happen in the future. I’m glad everyone seems to be moving forward quickly with a refund to those who were wrongly charged the MVET.
Silver lining? Not to be flippant, but thank goodness this didn’t break before the election!
When I first heard this I was sorely tempted by the thought that I wish no one had noticed! $3m is a lot of money to give back, especially as I am sure it was spent already and now ST will have to repay itself!
Yes, you’re right – thank goodness this didn’t break before the election!
Tim
I love how they blame the computers. Computers only do what they are programmed to do. It was human error, not computer.
My understanding is that the computer system wasn’t sophisticated enough — obviously that should change.
As with all software bugs. But a computer system written by a contracted company for a purpose that may have changed dramatically? We don’t get to just point a finger.
What’s amusing is that this error probably cost taxpayers less than replacing the computer system.
This happens all the time, though. The weight rests on the taxpayer to make sure they aren’t paying something they ought not be paying.
Working customer service for a utility, occasionaly a customer will call regarding this same issue. The utility collects the cities’ utility taxes and than disburses those to the city. Sometimes a customer will call stating they are in the county and not the city and than the company has to go into the system and change the coding issue or whatever it was that caused that location to be included in the city and be charged the city tax. It can happen for any number of reasons, but its a pretty easy fix once its either dectected or a customer notifies the company.
It should only take a phone call to fix this though if this problem happens to you, not a lawsuit. Although like in this case, usually there are more than just one customer affected by it.
Ahh, but lawsuits are the American Way! Free money – money for nothing – the proverbial jackpot!
The state has made attempts to upgrade its software, but the legislature never funds these programs. No elected official wants to be accused of giving more tools to the taxman. Reactionary voters (ie, Republicans) would scare citizens into thinking new computer software would be used to extract more money from them – as opposed to making the system more accurate.
To play devil’s advocate, these may be people who are benefiting from ST service just outside the taxing area.
;-)
Yes, I thought that too – I actually wish I lived in the ST taxing district but though I live in rural Issaquah off the SR 900 and use the Issaquah P&R with its 554 and 555/556, we don’t live in a ST taxable part of the district
Tim
Yes, the RTA boundary could actually use some moving. We’ve built some more sprawl in the last fifteen years.