Dellums' taxes, my taxes and all small business taxes

Other than the fact that his contested taxes add up to more than my little company’s gross income, I do not know anything about Ron Dellums’ tax problems.

What I have heard are some criticisms of Dellums that do not match our experience. Most of these nasty comments about Dellums run along the lines of “how could he not know?” and “after so many years they should have found this out”.

My own little company also owes back taxes. Why? The quick answer is that not everyone does their job as they should. You can separate from the person who did not do their work correctly, but the company still holds the responsibility to fix things.

So, a phone call to the IRS and corrected returns, a payment plan and you are fixed, right?

NO, not right. As any small business owner in Oakland will tell you, not only are taxes high, it is hard to get information and it is a lot of work to deal with it all. That is why I hired someone to do it for me in the first place.

As it stands, my little company pays taxes to 4 levels of government with at least 12 different ways or reporting it and a few different ways and schedules to pay it. That is after I dropped my resellers permit because there were 3 ways to report the fact that we did not sell anything about 6 times a year. (We are a service business and only had the resellers permit to help the clients out on the odd large job)

It does not help that the tax agencies have no requirement to be accurate and informative in what they request from us. We got letters that “estimated” our income at several times the real amount and demanded taxes. One level of government will tell you that you never filed for a certain year and you owe then $27,000 by Thursday and another will just tack on $30,000 to your estimated value of your office equipment. Then when you talk with them about it all you get is “OK, just ignore that” but not any written receipt saying that they were wrong. Sometimes you get TOO LATE so PAY UP. That is what Alameda County told us about the extra value they tacked onto our office equipment (60 times what it really is.

Could it take 3 years for the tax authorities to let Ron know that his taxes are not paid in an ACCURATE manner. I think it could.

Does it mean anything that Dellums has a tax lien? Yeah, it means he got treated the same way everyone else does. It does not matter if you agree with them. It does not matter that you start to pay them; the lien just comes as standard operating procedure. What that lien gets you is a lot of phone calls from scam artists offering to “help” you.

I do not know enough to fault Ron Dellums on his back taxes. Given my experience, I do not see any reason not to believe him. Given my income level, I wish I had enough money to owe that much tax.

On the other hand we hear nothing but silence from the official mayoral candidates on how hard it is for a business, especially a small business, to navigate the system stay in compliance and to pay taxes.

That I do fault them for.