Fighting Corruption at the CA Franchise Tax Board (CA's income tax agency)
I am excited to announce that I have been invited by the California_Politics sub-reddit on the website Reddit to do an “Ask Me Anything” on the topic of Citizen Activism. The thread is live now, so feel free to ask any questions that you may have. My user name is ChristineGrab.
Summary:
*Governor Brown, FTB Board of Directors (Betty Yee, State Controller; Keely Bosler, Director of Department of Finance, and Malia Cohen, BOE Chairperson, and the FTB Taxpayer Advocate Susan Maples are all aware of these unlawful collection practices and have not put an end to them.
*Governor Brown and State Controller Betty Yee have recently re-structured the Appeals process to make it more expensive and/or difficult to recover these unfairly applied penalties, fees and interest.
*It looks to me like the State Government is sanctioning these unlawful collection practices and rigging the system to ensure that taxpayers can’t get this unlawfully collected money back.
I. Restructuring the Appeal Process:
Up until January 2018, if a Taxpayer believed they were unfairly charged penalties, fees and interest by the Franchise Tax Board, they could file an appeal with the Board of Equalization.
Continue reading “Systemic Erosion of Our California Taxpayer Rights”Summary: I have caught the Franchise Tax Board, California’s Income Tax Collection Agency, utilizing an assortment of unlawful practices to scam extra tax money out of people (Section 1). I have been trying to put a stop to this government corruption (section 2). If you’d like to help me, I have suggestions at the bottom (section 3).
Both former Governor Brown and current Governor Newsom are actively protecting these schemes, as are State Controller Betty Yee and an assortment of other legislators.
Here is a video of me giving an 8-minute speech to legislators in December 2018, asking them to end some of these schemes. Since I was limited to only eight minutes, I couldn’t address all of the schemes that I’ve found. In the video, I flat out accused them of racketeering, along with other assorted violations. Even though they had more time to speak, the FTB only gave a 2-minute response. Susan Maples only responded to two of the eight items that I brought up, and Jozel Brunett gave a blanket statement that FTB is not doing anything unlawful.
The FTB’s written response to my speech is here: https://www.ftb.ca.gov/about-ftb/meetings/taxpayer-bill-of-rights/2018_Grab_Response.pdf. This response is full of legal improprieties – so much so that the Taxpayer Advocate refused to sign it when I pointed out that her signature was missing.
Continue reading “California’s Unlawful Schemes to Collect Extra Income Taxes From Taxpayers”One of my favorite bloggers is Caitlin Johnstone. It seems like every time I start to doubt whether I really should be investing so much time and energy into fighting government corruption, she’ll post something that re-affirms for me that I am doing the right thing.
Here are a couple of the posts from her that I found most inspirational:
How To Own Life Like A Fucking Wizard
and
It’s all about not letting them control narrative. I can — and will — change things for the better by stopping the false narratives. You can, too!
In California, we each have two State Legislators that represent us on State matters — one is our State Senator and the other is our Assemblyman. If you don’t know who yours is, you can find them here
The State Legislative cycle goes like this: Mid-September through December, the legislators take suggestions from their constituents and mull them over. They take the ideas that they like best and they draft legislature that they introduce in January. Then from January through September, all the legislators debate the various bills that were introduced in January. At the beginning of September, all the bills get final votes. And then the cycle starts again!
So if you have any ideas about new legislature that you’d like to see enacted, or changes to be made to existing legislature, now is the time to contact your representatives.