Uh yeah. First of all, most* states require that you attach your 1040 and relevant schedules to your state tax return in the first place. Second of all the federal government absolutely shares information with the states.
*Offhand I’d guess all that have an income tax, but possibly there exists one that I’ve never seen that doesn’t. Certainly most do. If you e-file, the software is probably doing that automatically and you might not have noticed.
This is how most states with an income tax work, FYI.
The feds compile a Wage & Income transcript for each & every taxpayer which contains every W-2, 1098, 1099, and 5498 that was properly filed using your Social Security Number. They will absolutely reconcile every detail on the Wage & Income transcript to your 1040. I mean, if you’re off by $1 on your W-2 income they might not bother to complain to you about it, but they’ll notice.
The states get your federal return along with anything the feds questioned on it. Like if you reported $10,000 of self-employment income before expenses, but you were issued $25,000 worth of 1099s, the state will see that you filed a Schedule C with $10,000 of gross income and the IRS questioned why it wasn’t $25,000.
But they want you to include a copy of your federal return when you file because it takes a while for them to get the federal return and tons of people make mistakes on stupid stuff that they can catch a lot faster just by looking at your federal return.
I suspected so, but if I had expressed that suspicion that in my post, I would have very quickly been proven wrong. 
This is what I was referring to. I cannot speak to CT.
If the debt has been written off to a collection agency, I don’t see why you would pay the taxing authority that sold the debt and no longer owns it?
And sometimes this stuff is in the taxpayer’s favor too.
Like, the IRS noticed that your W-2 was for $102,400, but you accidentally fat-fingered it as $104,200… whelp you just paid tax on $1,800 of income that you didn’t actually have. If you’re in the 22% tax bracket and otherwise current on everything, the IRS will send you a check for $396 plus interest and a letter explaining why. People get so confused when the IRS sends them money they didn’t ask for, but it happens all the time.
They won’t do things like point out that you forgot to claim your middle child or took the standard deduction when you would have been better off itemizing. But if you fat-finger a number they have access to or make an arithmetic error then they’ll fix that for you.
Oh, yeah, I guess for something that’s 10 years old that makes sense. I was thinking of an amount that is current. OK, scratch that part.
@ViceFleeble I have found via Google that CT has no statute of limitation on tax liabilities, though the state cannot pursue you with a lawyer after 15 years.
However, if they’ve sold your debt I don’t know that you have to care what CT does anymore?
And therein lies the problem. The “I paid for 2013” argument is only as good as the evidence I can provide of payment. But if you’re asking me to remember when I paid a certain bill and how I paid it after 9-10 years, that’s where memory gets fuzzy. Even banks aren’t required to keep financial records beyond 7 years. My bank keeps records for 10 years. Couldn’t find any record of payment to CT, but I had another bank account at the time and it’s possible that CT could have used a billing service that accepted credit cards.
When I dispute the debt, the collection agency can contact CT for additional evidence. It’s up to both CT and the agency to decide how hard they want to work to pursue this debt.
This is also a problem for the debt collector. Governments aren’t the greatest at keeping records and in giving records to debt collectors they’re worse.
Similarly, if they send you a check and you fail to deposit it, they will eventually discover it and try to send you another check.
(A large tax refund check sent to my parents around the time my mother passed away never got deposited. They sent another check during pandemic lockdowns, when I had taken over my father’s finances due to dementia. The check was too large for me to deposit via app, and I wasn’t willing to travel the 1000 miles to the nearest branch during lockdown.
Eventually managed to get to a bank…and had the deposit refused by the bank because they were confused by the complexity of the circumstances. Had to file with the IRS to get a fresh check…then my father passed away before they issued the fresh check, necessitating more paperwork, which generated more paperwork and required me to extend a probate bond and appease a grumpy probate judge because I couldn’t close the estate in a timely manner… Lots of fun.)
Eh, how plausible is it that you missed a year?
Based on the timing sounds like you may have missed one that you legit owed, no?
Are they billing you just for the one year, plus interest & penalties? Or are they billing you for 10 years? Something else?
If they haven’t provided an itemized breakdown of the amount due definitely ask for that so you have a fighting chance of figuring out what’s legit and what’s not.
But what about a state that you did NOT file in? I think BigBlackBen was referring to this sort of situation.
software that I’ve used for e-file requires an additional charge to file the state tax. So I’m not sure just how “automatic” the state filing is going to be given one does the federal filing this way.
The bill breaks out what is tax vs. interest vs. collection fees. And based on what MS mentioned it sounds like I may have missed my final year, but can’t say for sure because they waited almost 10 years to tell me that I missed my final year. I like to deal honestly as much as I can, but tough to do when entities don’t act in good faith.
Wait, holup, wtf did I just read?
what the heck is that?
I think the only way the feds would know whether you filed a state/local tax return is if the state/municipality told the feds.
I certainly have never needed to send a state return to the feds, and while I have sometimes needed to tell them how much state/local income tax I paid when itemizing deductions, I don’t recall ever identifying which states/municipalities were involved.
They could presumably glean the information of who was receiving the tax payments from W2, etc. data they receive, but that still wouldn’t tell them that returns were being filed in those states.
They are usually called “annual registration fees” but they are technically an annual property tax. Haven’t checked all 50 states but I’d be shocked if there were any states that did not have this.
In CT, we have registration for our cars, every 4 years I think. We also pay tax on certain real property, specifically, house and cars. Probably things like boats too, but I don’t have a boat.
Actually, in Connecticut, property taxes apply not only to real estate but other forms of property.
For individuals, that means that we pay property taxes on our cars. For businesses…it’s even broader.
Property taxes are over/above taxes associated with vehicle registrations.
It’s annoying, especially since towns are restricted in their ability to charge different mill rates by class of property. There’s a state law constraining the mill rate when applied to vehicles, but…
This leads to people having wildly different tax bills on their cars depending on what town they live in. In Greenwich, where the mill rate is low due to the extremely high property values, the tax bill on a car will be low. However in the urban hellhole of Hartford, where high municipal expenses and low property values indicate a high mill rate…the tax bill on the car will be significantly larger (approaching 3×).
Property taxes in Connecticut ain’t cheap. Bui we have generally good schools, generally fast cleanup of the roads after winter storms, and lower sales taxes than low/no-income tax or low-property tax states.
(My property tax bill actually declined last year, because a couple of relatively new Amazon distribution facilities in town grew the town’s grand list faster than the town could increase its budget.)
