My writing has been pretty negative lately – the world *is* a hot mess – and today’s not gonna be much different. I spent the entire day yesterday trapped in the Kafka-esque world of California’s Franchise Tax Board. I ultimately escaped, with some victories, but the journey took a toll. Stressful.

First you have to understand that the FTB has been designed to be hostile to all human contact. Once you get on their radar for a wrong or missed payment, no matter how slight, you’re in for an increasingly threatening set of letters (or “Notices”) from them, demanding payment. No middle ground, no discussion, just pay or be punished.

You can only contact them online if you sign up for a “MyFTB” account, and that’s not easy. For example, their password requirement on that account is 15 characters, upper/lower case, numbers and special characters, 15! Once you’ve got an account, yes, you can see certain helpful information, but if you want to send them a message you have to use their in-portal mail tool and they tell you it will take 30 days for them to respond. It must be smoke signals behind the email.

The you try to contact them by phone to figure out what’s wrong, and most days you get a message saying sorry, their call volume is extremely high and they can’t even put you on hold. You just can’t reach them today. That’s helpful.

One day a month ago I got through to an agent – wonder of wonders – but unfortunately, that agent was having a bad day. I wanted to discuss a $14,000 demand notice I had received. My records showed that we didn’t owe that; that we had paid everything owed for the last couple of years. The FTB agent informed me that his records showed something different, so he was through talking and we should send payment. Not the slightest interest in discussing why there was a discrepancy or that FTB records might be in error.

Yesterday I got lucky. I got a different message telling me that yes, they would put me in queue to speak with an agent, and that the hold time would be 2.5 to 4 hours. Then, amazingly, I got a recording saying they would call me back instead of me holding. I accepted, and crossed fingers that their system would work as planned.

I did get a callback, and this time I got an agent who would at least listen. Within about 30 minutes of discussion/research, she determined that one of our big payments had been mistakenly placed in “suspense” – not applied to our tax bill as intended – and that she could fix that. She did, and she said it would take 104 days (a weirdly specific long time) for the unfrozen payment to make its way through their system and for our balance to be settled. She also said she would remove us from the threatening chain of letters they send. A great victory!

There was one other matter I needed help with, because I suspected that some of our problem with FTB was due to identity theft fraud. I won’t go into how/why I thought this, though I have been through a similar situation with the IRS and I saw similar evidence. She put me through to the FTB’s fraud division, and yes, they agreed that someone had stolen K’s identity and was issuing fraudulent returns in her name. They agreed to get on the case and fix things for us. Another victory!

Even with the positive results, the effort was exhausting. Collecting multiple years worth of tax info. Answering identity questions over and over and over. Staying polite after so many interactions with them that oozed contempt for the taxpayer. The FTB is a perfect example of our tax dollars being used as a blunt instrument against citizens. It doesn’t have to be that way, but here we are.

It’s a lot like UK’s basketball game yesterday. Ugly at times, it didn’t have to be that difficult, and it took longer than necessary. It took a little luck to get through. But in the end I’ll take the win and move on.