January 2003: Arizona Tries to Shake Me Down
1/10/2003. I pick up the mail on the way home and discover, to my
shock and disbelief, the result of my audit: Motorcycles are specifically
excluded from the tax credit. I am to pay back all of the credit for 1999,
and re-file amended returns for 2000 and 2001: so I will have to pay back
all that credit as well.
Along with interest. Interest!
The short story is, Arizona screwed up majestically and now they’re
going after anyone connected with the tax credit at all in order to cover
themselves.
What really upsets me is that I have absolutely fulfilled the spirit
of the law: I rode my Lectra in order to commute to work, every day for
the three years that I had it. It was no scam. But now I’m going to pay
for it, and I’m going to pay with interest. I have to pay $363.91
in interest, and that’s just tax year 1999. The interest for my soon-to-be-amended
returns for 2000 and 2001 are merrily compounding interest as well, I am
sure.
The auditor found ARS 43-1086, which
specifically excludes motorcycles from the tax credit. When I was
doing my research on it, the only electric-vehicle information I had found
was ARS 28-5805,
which basically says that as long as it “meets the safety standards of
the national highway traffic safety administration”, it’s a vehicle.
The other thing I need to find out, and I don’t know if I can, is
what the law looked like in tax year 1999, vs. what it looks like now.
Arizona hastily rewrote almost all of the alternative fuel law after they
found out that people were doing things like using it to buy trucks that
ran on CNG (compressed natural gas) and gasoline and never using the CNG
portion, etc. I am not sure how to find that out—the only statutes online
are the most current versions.
And what is a regular guy like me going to do anyway? It’s like when
your computer’s operating system has a bug in it: even if you’re in the
right and it’s in the wrong, you lose. Whether or not it screwed
up, it’s going to corrupt your data. And there’s not a thing you
can do about it—except not to use the computer in the first place.
You might be saying, “so what, Jones, a couple thousand dollars in
interest. It’s not the end of the world.” No, of course not. It’s the
principle of the thing. That’s what makes me so upset. If you don’t
wanna provide an incentive, then just DON’T, and leave it at that. Don’t
lure people into being your investment, at their expense. I expect this
kind of behavior from spammers, car salesmen, and Columbia Record House,
but not from my government.
I know one thing: I’m not giving up until I find out that the statute
she quoted, and the motorcycle exclusion in it, was in effect at the time
I filed my return.
Read on to see what I discovered about
the 1999 version of ARS 43-1086...