With the April deadline looming, taxpayers might ponder the prospects of filing a return in which they fail to account for millions of dollars. As it happens, that is the case with a California tax agency. According to Board of Equalization member Betty Yee, who is now state controller, the BOE misallocated $47.8 million…
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Maybe it is the season to be jolly, but California taxpayers are still getting over their sticker shock on higher property tax bills, and the extension of steep income-tax hikes that were supposed to be “temporary.” Governor Jerry Brown, a born-again tax hiker, promoted that extension and has also been playing the sinecure Santa…
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Property tax bills showed up back in October in envelopes reading: TAX BILL – OPEN IMMEDIATELY. Note the light touch, sort of like “hand over the wallet, Jack!” This year, many taxpayers will have to dig deeper in their wallet, but not because California’s county governments are providing them more and better services. The…
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In 1978, when Jerry Brown was governor, soaring property taxes were literally driving people from their homes. Embattled Californians responded with the People’s Initiative to Limit Property Taxation. This measure capped property tax rates for residential and commercial properties at 1 percent of the assessed value and prevented assessed value from growing more than…
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With newspapers in decline, stories about government waste, fraud and abuse tend to get short shrift. One notable exception is Jon Ortiz of the Sacramento Bee, whose “State Worker” columns demonstrate how waste works. For example, California’s Board of Equalization, a tax agency, wanted to replace a door. The initial cost for that simple…
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Taxpayers are familiar with waste in boondoggles such as California’s $68 billion bullet train project and the new span of the Bay Bridge with its cost overruns of $5 billion. Likewise, State Parks bureaucrats keep a hidden slush fund of $54 million and education bosses get lavish salaries and benefits unconnected to student achievement….
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Government waste abounds in California but is not always easy to spot. Veteran observer Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee suggests a hard look at “overlapping and utterly confusing governmental entities that cloud accountability.” His first example is the California Coastal Commission, by some accounts the most powerful land-use body in the nation, and…
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Contrary to what many politicians seem to believe, government makes mistakes. For example, as the intrepid Jon Ortiz of the Sacramento Bee notes, the state of California recently overpaid some 20,000 employees. The overpayments amount to $37 to $101 per employee and, overall, about 5 percent of all state paychecks in a single month….
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The Denver Broncos took the game 24-10 but the real winners of Super Bowl 50 were California’s pillage people. This is due to the state’s “jock tax” on players and coaches for their “duty days” in the state. As Matthew Artz notes in the San Jose Mercury News, California’s jock tax is highest in…
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With all this excitement over national elections, taxpayers may have lost count of how much their state government is taking from them. Fortunately, veteran Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters has been keeping track. By his count, “California’s state and local governments hit us with about $250 billion in taxes every year, $6,000-plus per Californian.”…
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