Pennsylvania resident gets a staggering $34 billion tax bill. Then, he realized what went wrong
A Pennsylvania man was shocked to his core when he opened a bill from the state for $34 billion. After the initial shock, he looked at the bills and understood that there was a mistake. "I couldn't fathom what the number was at first. I'm like it looks like more than a million. The decimal points are dropped down. They're not even on the first line there are so many digits," he told Fox 43.
"I knew it was an obvious blunder. I don’t even make over $100,000 a year, so there’s no way I could owe anywhere near that," Barry Tangert told News 8, via NY Post.
The Lancaster County resident said that the letter was one of the two things that had arrived in his mail. The first one was a refund check from the federal government for over $900, while the second opened was an income notice from the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue claiming that he owed a jaw-dropping $34,576,826,561.47.
The number was so large that it didn't even fit on a single line on the document. There's absolutely no doubt that this was an error. However, he is still in the dark when it comes to what caused it. I don’t know if it was a computer glitch in the transmission or if it was an input error from my tax preparer," he said.
Tangert later reached out to the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue, which did provide a bit of relief to the man. "The first thing he said was, 'You had a good year.' And I said, 'I wish'" he said. The amount mentioned was triple the $11 billion America’s richest man Elon Musk says he owed the government in 2022.
Tangert later reached out to the Department of Revenue who asked him to wait while they look into it. He was told that the tax document that he had submitted had a bunch of 9s on the bottom, which made it look like his income was more than $99 billion. "It could have been an input from your tax firm or it could have been an interface problem with their program and our program, we don't know yet," Tangert recalled the department telling him.
After a few weeks, he got another letter in the mail that showed that it was actually the state that owed him $62, which made more sense to Tangert. "If I've ever owed anything to the state it was more than likely $100 or less," he added. "You'd have to be a trillionaire or $100 billion a year based on current tax rates, they tax about a third. You'd have to make $100 billion a year to be taxed 30 billion or thereabouts. Does anybody make $100 billion a year?" he told the publication.
Fortunately, the State Department has since resolved the issue which it chalked up to wrong numbers being inputted into the system. "I don’t know if it was a computer glitch in the transmission or if it was an input error from my tax preparer," he said.
