Louisiana Makes Me WILD!

Yesterday I got a Certified letter from the state of Louisiana saying that I owed them $600+ for Withholding Taxes.  This was for my son’s company,

When he moved from Texas to Louisiana in February of 2009, he tried to find a little work down there.  At one point, he thought he was on the verge of getting a nice contract to install SharePoint and a back-up solution for a company with offices in Louisiana and Texas.  His brother in Illinois was on tap to assist with the installation, so I dutifully set up an account with Louisiana, and another with Illinois to pay withholding on their salaries.

Unfortunately, the economy was still so shaky that the contract never materialized, and my Louisiana son took a job with

in July, 2010.  My Illinois son attempted to find contract work for the company in Illinois, but that never materialized, either.  By the middle of the fall, we realized that no one was bringing in any revenue to the company, and I took steps to shut it down.  I filled out the forms of dissolution for Texas (where it was registered), and wrote letters to both Illinois and Louisiana saying that we had never had any employees in their states, never paid any wages, and consequently, we did not owe any withholding to them.

After I got the Certified letter from them yesterday, I called and asked them what they were talking about.  They acknowledged the receipt of that letter, and even quoted from it to me over the phone.  They said I still had to file a return showing no tax due – and I could do it on the website.  When I had tried to do just that, the form on the website refused to take $0.00 as amount paid, or owed.

The upshot of it is, I had to manually fill out 8 months worth of $0.00 wages, $0.00 tax due, and an end-of-year recapitulation!  I sent it off Certified mail today, to the tune of $4.12 postage.

This had better be the end of it.