It’s called electronic copy of and photoshop. How does the state plan to go about verifying the submitted paperwork’s numbers are real? Not saying people are going to do this. But this system is flawed. For it to work, state needs to be able to tap into the countys’ systems. Or the counties need to be able to send a form to the state directly.
And guess what? State ain’t gonna have money to put a system like this in place in the forseeable future.
A random audit *might* expose a tax cheat, but otherwise a photoshopped bill it’s not going to trigger any computer system flag because a computer isn’t going to be able to tell a real form from a fake…
Anytime you depend on the filer to fill “forms” as proof of information, that’s a flawed design. That’s exactly why 1099’s need to be sent from banks/financial institutions directly to the IRS/FTB.
Otherwise, counting on a taxpayer to send in the paperwork is just plain stupid.
This is just one of many ways I can think of that folks can rig the system… This is the most bold (arguably most stupid way of doing it, because it only bypasses the electronic “eyes”, but not the human eye in case of a random audit). There are a bunch other ways I can think of how it can be gamed from that angle.
I’m not condoling anything illegal. I just like pointing out flawed systems, and it is a very flawed system. But to most people’s point out here, most people probably aren’t going to go that extreme and send in doctored statements…[/quote]
flu, I can’t see this *new* FTB software being “glitch free” the first year of operation either without legislation requiring county assessors to send only the ad valorem tax portion of each of their parcels to the FTB.
Perhaps such a bill is in the pipeline now. I will research this issue later tonight.
And good luck with all your copy/paste and photoshop ideas, flu :=0
