A frustrating encounter with the state tax bureaucracy

By Thomas Farragher Globe Columnist  November 06, 2015

Michael Wood had a solid professional business in Bridgewater until five years ago, when he and his wife chucked it all and pursued a dream that would be a cliché if it weren’t so real and so lovely.

They bought an old country inn in Vermont’s Okemo Valley, an 18th century jewel — a place of wide pine floorboards, warm chocolate chip cookies, a crackling fireplace, and to-die-for vistas. 

So the guy is the picture of serenity, right? No. His head is about to explode.

“I went nuts,’’ he told me.

The reason that Wood has been driven around the bend? It’s that friendly agency we’ve come to know as the Massachusetts Department of Revenue, our little version of the Internal Revenue Service.

Here’s Wood’s version of events:
He has a son. His name is also Michael Wood. In 2009, the elder Wood earned about $130,000. His son, then 24, earned $20,000. Both paid their taxes. Then a mistake was made. The IRS erroneously applied the father’s income to the son, charging him with $35,000 in taxes, $7,000 in penalties, and $3,000 in interest. 

Oh, Michael Wood the father said to himself, I see what’s happened here. And then he coined an 11-word sentence that he’s repeated scores of times since: “The government simply applied my income to my son’s tax return.’’

The IRS got it instantly. He wrote the feds a simple one-page letter. Within a month, the problem went away. Or so he thought.

Two years later, he fell into the taxpayer rabbit hole that is the DOR, beginning a Kafkaesque trail of tears that remains unsettled.

The state agency went after his son for $11,000 plus penalties and interest, all because it couldn’t figure out that a simple mistake had been made.

Since then, the elder Michael Wood, besides greeting guests at his Vermont inn, has had a second part-time job: dealing with the maddening cluelessness of an agency that is supposed to know tax law but apparently can’t tell which end is up.

In the interim, the DOR suspended his son’s driver’s license, rendering him unemployable. The agency, Wood said, has been relentlessly rude, unprofessional, and utterly clueless about tax law that is not that complex.

Did I mention that Wood, who grew up in Easton, has been a certified public accountant for 35 years? So when his attempts to walk the DOR through its simple and easy-to-understand mistake were met with a series of non-answers and dead ends, he struggled to maintain his composure.

“They told me the only way around this was to pay $11,700 and I said, ‘Lady, the kid doesn’t have a driver’s license. He doesn’t have a job. He isn’t going to pay $11,000.’ ” DOR’s response? Pay $11,000.

“The system is broken,’’ Wood said. “It’s just wrong. These people suck all the power from you because they own it. It’s a lousy feeling.’’


This kind of professional discourtesy is hard to stomach when your modem won’t work and you’re on the phone with some guy from India or Indianapolis. But more than Internet service is at stake here. Livelihoods and credit ratings hang in the balance.

Last month, Wood’s old accounting firm partner sat next to a former DOR honcho at a professional conference. Wood e-mailed the ex-honcho, was put in touch with a DOR taxpayer advocate, and, voila, his son’s driver’s license was released. But the tax liability remains.

“The DOR has acted as if this is a police state and that my son is guilty of tax evasion,’’ he said.
I experienced some of Wood’s frustration this week. I tried repeatedly to speak with DOR Commissioner Mark Nunnelly so he could explain this mess. Instead, I received an e-mail on Friday from an agency promising to do better. “[We] agree that the process took too long to resolve and that we missed opportunities to make it right,’’ it said. Wood said the DOR assured him this week that resolution is, at long last, imminent.

Look, I can barely tell the difference between the numerator and the denominator.

But even I can figure this out. What does it say about the agency that is collecting our taxes that it’s taken two years and they remain puzzled at this easiest of riddles?

Thomas Farragher is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at thomas.farragher@globe.com.