Lawmaker Makes State’s List of Tax Delinquents
By STEVEN WALTERS
Madison – The co-chairman of the Legislature’s budget committee was stunned Friday to learn that his name was on the state Department of Revenue’s newly expanded Internet list of delinquents who owe $5,000 or more in unpaid taxes.
"This is news to me," said Sen. Mark Miller (D-Monona), who was listed as owing $5,776 in unpaid income taxes. "I thought it had been taken care of."
He said the tax-liability question involved a private business of his wife, Josephine.
After checking with his wife, Miller said she had contacted the Revenue Department to work out a solution to the tax dispute, and she thought she had until Friday to resolve it.
The legislator said his wife was going to the state Revenue Department’s Madison headquarters immediately to resolve the issue.
When a taxpayer on the list contacts the Revenue Department and either pays the amount owed or makes arrangements to do so, his or her name is removed from the Internet within 24 hours, an agency official said.
Miller’s name was one of about 11,700 added to the Internet "shaming" list Friday under a new law that lowered – from $25,000 to $5,000 – the tax-liability threshold for individuals and businesses to make the list.
The Revenue Department has posted the names of its largest tax delinquents on the Internet since January 2006.
The only lawmaker on the list, Miller said his wife operates an industrial safety business. "It’s not my business at all," he said, adding that he could not explain why only his name and not his wife’s ended up on the tax-delinquent delinquency list.
He noted that they file a joint state income tax return and Wisconsin is a "community property" state.
"It’s a business tax liability that we incurred on our personal income tax," Miller added. "It’s something that is the result of a dispute with another company."
Like other taxpayers, Miller said, his wife got a November notice from the Revenue Department telling her the amount tax auditors say was owed and warning her that it qualified for the expanded list of tax delinquents.
"I know there was an assessment, but my understanding was it had been taken care of," he said.
Miller is co-chairman of the Joint Finance Committee, the 16- member panel that reviews all state spending and makes recommendations to the full Legislature.
Jessica Iverson, a Revenue Department spokeswoman, said privacy laws forbid agency officials from discussing details of any individual taxpayer on the Internet list.
Wisconsin’s new threshold of $5,000 is one of the lowest among all states with Internet "shaming" lists.
On Friday, 17,310 names of individuals and businesses were on the tax-delinquent list – three times the old number, Iverson said.
Taxpayers whose names would have been on the expanded list paid about $3.4 million since notices went out in November, keeping their names off the Internet, Iverson said.
Child support next?
In a related development, state Rep. Steve Wieckert (R- Appleton) said Friday he wants to change state law to post the names of anyone owing more than $500 in unpaid child support on the Internet site.
About $2.8 billion in unpaid support is owed by about 263,000 parents to more than 500,000 children in Wisconsin, Wieckert said.
"That is an enormous amount of money," Wieckert said in a prepared statement that noted the success of the Revenue Department’s Internet list in getting tax delinquents to pay up.
On the Web
To see the list of tax delinquents, go to www.revenue.wi.gov/
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