2017 was the first year that I participated in the Annual Taxpayer Bill of Rights Meeting. At the time, FTB hid this meeting from the public; I found out about the meeting from a tax lobbyist that I had contacted. When I submitted the first request, FTB told me that only tax professionals were allowed to submit, which was a lie. I complained to the governor and board members about being denied my taxpayer rights and was allowed to participate.
Rather than sending one letter, I sent several emails with requests as I thought of them. There were five requests in total. The first one addressed the policy of withholding payments made via credit elect. The second was to put the correct phone number on the notices (in my opinion, if anything proves the “mistakes” was an intentional scam it was putting the wrong number on notices, which made it nearly impossible to resolve the “problem.”). The third one was to have FTB staff disclose that people could make suggestions at the ATBOR meetings. The fourth one was to conform to the IRS guidelines of not requiring a tax return to be filed if the agency believes a refund is due. The fifth was to grant extensions on income tax filings for caregivers.
This is FTB’s 2017 Formal Resolution From FTB For My Annual Taxpayer Bill of Rights Requests (they have since changed the name of this document from “resolution” to “response.” Interestingly enough, FTB does not list it on their website, but if you want to verify it is legitimate, you can get a copy of it from the Disclosure Department.
FTB pulled a smarmy maneuver by failing to address the credit elect withholding practice and instead talked about the practice of withholding payments from married couples. That is when I was 100% sure that the credit withholding scheme was unlawful.
When I looked into the laws cited re: the withholding of estimated tax payments from married couples, it was clear the law said the exact opposite of what FTB claimed! FTB also said that they have no problem hiding the Annual Taxpayer Bill of Rights Meeting from the general public.
I responded to this by writing a letter to Governor Brown, and copied the FTB’s Board of Directors, where I went through the tax code line by line and showed how FTB cherry-picked words out of context to justify these policies; but when read in context, the laws say the exact opposite of what the FTB claims.
In the December 2018 ATBOR, I also requested that FTB disclose the meeting to the general public, and in 2019 FTB added information about it to their website! Woo hoo! Win for me!
I have had other regular people tell me that they have tried to submit to the ATBOR and were told no. FTB will let you participate if you push back and demand your rights be respected. Stand up for yourself!