States are holding on to your refunds
Financially strapped states are keeping your money longer to solve cash-flow problems.
Posted by Kay Bell on Tuesday, February 23, 2010 10:45 AM

Remember when everyone was snickering at California for issuing IOUs instead of tax refunds?

Quit laughing. More financially strapped states are holding onto their residents' tax refunds longer.

North Carolina's Revenue Secretary Kenneth Lay has announced that his office is delaying refund checks that both individuals and businesses are due. Holding on to the money is a cash-flow necessity, Lay said, because the state is facing a shortfall due to "anemic" collections, a common problem across the United States.

The Hawaii Department of Taxation, which already has up to 90 days before it has to send out checks to taxpayers, says that come July 1 it will release refunds on a "first-in-first-out basis." Delaying refunds will give the Aloha State a one-time savings of $275 million.

In New York, one of Gov. David Paterson's budget proposals could put taxpayers' refunds on hold to help deal with the Empire State's budget deficit. The proposal, which could delay some refunds for weeks or even months, is projected to provide short-term savings of $500 million.

What's a taxpayer to do aside from freak out? Right now, not much.
But if you are one of the taxpayers who will be waiting a while for your state refund, or even if your state was able to pay your tax cash in a timely manner, you might want to reconsider even being put in this situation.

Adjust your withholding now (at the federal level, too) so that you'll get your tax money throughout this year. In fact, see if you can fix it so that you'll owe your state tax collector a few dollars instead of the other way around.

That way it will be the tax department waiting on you in 2011.

Which coupled with this bullshit again really pisses me off. I say shoot the assholes...... :xcensoredx:

Greedy Wall Street assholes that haven't learned a damn thing....shoot em' all 

Tuesday, February 23, 2010
NEW YORK CITY (AP) -- Wall Street bonuses were up 17 percent to over $20 billion in 2009, the year taxpayers bailed out the financial sector after its meltdown, New York state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said Tuesday.

Total compensation at the largest securities firms grew beyond that figure and profits could surpass what he calls an unprecedented $55 billion last year, DiNapoli said. That's nearly three times Wall Street's record increase, a rate of growth that is boosted in part by the record losses in 2008 of nearly $43 billion, the Democrat said.

"Wall Street is vital to New York's economy, and the dollars generated by the industry help the state's bottom line," said DiNapoli. "But for most Americans, these huge bonuses are a bitter pill and hard to comprehend. ... Taxpayers bailed them out, and now they're back making money while many New York families are still struggling to make ends meet."..........

"vikesrule" wrote:

I'm not worried about our state taxes.. I'm pissed off at our Federal. We have to pay in this year. Well, the past 3 years we've had to pay in, but the prior 2 years, I was a subcontractor, so I expected and planned for it.

This year was a kick in the nuts. I was and still am pretty perturbed. We'll have to pay in more for 2009 than we had to the prior two years combined. And all throughout 2009 neither one of us were subcontractors. I did not plan for this, so now we are pretty much left hanging out to dry.

"Formo" wrote:

"Formo" wrote: