the program's ultimate goal — to identify people who are failing to pay local car taxes because their wheels are not correctly registered in the city
Bridgeport's City Council late this past winter hired Fischer Investigations of Berlin to spend the next two years scouring Connecticut's largest municipality for cars and trucks that should be on the tax roll.
https://www.ctpost.com/news/article/bridgeport-ct-out-of-state-car-registration-review-20413829.php
That right there, is how the govt increases their income.. they get active on digging up more taxpayers, so they can blow the money on giving themselves raises
Vehicle taxation in Connecticut is a bit of a mess, because local property tax is applied to them, so you're billed every year for whatever cars are registered. What this means is that a vehicle can be taxed at wildly different rates depending on what town you're in. I lived in a small, relatively low-value town, which resulted in a high mill rate. I paid a great deal more tax on my cars than I would on the same cars if I had lived a mile away in the wealthier neighboring town. It can be a big hassle to get an adjustment if your car does not meet the official valuation owing to damage and the like, and another hassle if it's damaged or demolished during the year. I used to be on the Board of Tax Review, so this came up from time to time.
ReplyDeleteI looked it up and it's still more or less the same, but at least they have changed the assessment basis. It used to be based on the NADA dealer price guide, which meant the assessment could actually go up as the car aged, if its theoretical sale price went up. That was a special problem for cars kept a long time that were deemed to become classic. This being the basis for all property tax, and one of the fundamental reasons it is regressive: all values are predicated on everything always being for sale, and thus, in a sense you never truly own what you think you own because the price others set determines whether you are allowed to keep it. (rant rant....) But anyway, now they're going to base it on new price and depreciate it more rationally, it seems. It still presents a problem, though, if your town or city has a high tax rate, and though I'm no great fan of trying to cheat governments or weasel out of one's civic obligations, I can sympathize.
wow, you just added so much needed context... I didn't know they were taxing cars in that property tax rigamarole. I was stationed in Groton Ct for a year, and bought a truck, but can't recall anything about the tax. This was 1990, and so my recollection of relatively minor things 35 years ago is almost wiped out. Unless it amazed me, or was life changing, there's not much in the memory bank from that long ago.
DeleteAnd reading your comment (thank you a bunch!) tells me it's complicated, and detrimental to classic car owners who aren't rich, and house owners on a fixed income. Taxes based on the market value, of something appreciating, will sooner or later force some fixed income retired people, into bankruptcy, possibly.
Thank good ness the govt isn't itemizing parts on the garage shelves, antique furniture, coin collections, cool old guitars, etc!
I imagine anyone with some newsworthy item, like a famous painting from the dutch masters, or world series home run base ball, etc etc, are seeing a tax bill getting bigger every year. What a horrible tax situation!
To know that the revolution was partly based on a 3 cent tea tax? But that relatively was nothing compared to the annual property tax, is crazy.
I guess it's universal though, to make a receipt for selling your old car for next to nothing, so that the buyer gets the state to base the registration tax on that amount, versus what the car's market value is.
When I bought my 69 Super Bee in 1995, the seller didn't want his wife to know he self it for 2600, so that he could have all that money for beer. I kid you not. He wrote me a sales receipt for 100. I didn't want the state charging me registration based on 2600, so I was quite pleased with that myself!
So far, the property tax in Connecticut applies only to cars and real estate and not to personal property. For some real estate there is a safety net, with frozen rates for seniors, and "use value" assessment for farmland that is actually farmed. It can still be a burden, though, if you don't fit into the right categories. And of course there's also always the reverse problem, because any law good or bad will be exploited by someone, so we get "hobby farms" with just enough horses or sheep to make your personal park a farm, and zillionaires claiming their gullwings are just old cars. It is indeed complicated.
ReplyDeleteAh... but it also probably applies to planes, and yachts. San Diego was hitting me every year I owned and lived on a 48 ft Chris Craft in San Diego bay... 2003-2007. Really, that was a way to try and live less expensively than an apartment, but huh, that was because I was unaware how damn expensive ship yard can be
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