The FTB’s lawyer for my case against them is Anna Barsegyan, Deputy Attorney General under Xavier Becerra, the Attorney General of California. Yes, I know… most of us believe that the Attorney’s General’s office is supposed to protect the public from corruption. But that is only partly true — while the Attorney General’s office does prosecute criminal activity committed by individuals and private businesses, one of it’s job duties is to defend the State Government’s criminal activity. So basically, the Attorney General’s job is to eliminate the competition so that the government has a monopoly on exploitation.
I know I should be grateful that Ms. Barsegyan did such a terrible job on the Answer that she submitted to the Court in response to my Complaint, but quite frankly, I am disappointed at how our tax dollars are spent. For as much money as she makes, she could have made some kind of effort to do her job.
In the opening, she makes a blanket statement denying all allegations that FTB is fraudulently imposing penalties and fees via “misapplication” of payments and unlawful withholding practices, and overcharging interest. But in the body she does not attempt to dispute any of my specific allegations. The law says that a lack of denial is deemed an admission of truth. Furthermore, the defense did not dispute the validity of any of the evidence that I submitted, including overcharging of interest and inaccurate accounting ledgers.
Instead of addressing the points I brought up, she tried to take control of the narrative by changing the arguments. She submitted twelve random affirmative defenses that have nothing to do with anything in my case. It looks to me like she went into a database of potential defense arguments, then copied and pasted anything that could be remotely relevant into her brief. She didn’t even bother to customize the wording for my case or try to explain how any of these random arguments applied to my case. To me, it feels like she took a handful of cooked rotini noodles and threw them at the wall in the hopes one or two would stick.
She did such a bad job that some of the defensive arguments are completely false. For example: “Third Affirmative Defense: Plaintiff lacks standing to the extent that Plaintiff did not pay taxes, interest or penalties for which refund is sought in this action.” Um — every record submitted by me and the FTB in my OTA hearing confirmed the penalties and interest that we paid. And she didn’t dispute the validity of any of the records that I submitted to Superior Court proving the money that we’d paid.
Here is her brief. It is short and a quick read: https://gwsandiego.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/ATTorney-General-Response-for-FTB.pdf