Making New Year’s resolutions is a tradition, a tradition that includes not keeping the resolutions made.
We have a suggestion for Maine.
This year, make fewer resolutions and take more action.
When Gov.-elect John Baldacci assumes his office following his Jan. 8 inauguration, his primary task will be to straighten out Maine’s financial mess.
What will help him is that we’ve already studied the deficit at length, predictions have been made about how deep in debt we will fall and some action has been taken to pay bills. But not enough.
In September, Charles Silsby, director of the Criminal Investigations Unit of the Maine Revenue Services, said, “There is enough money out there (in uncollected taxes) to wipe out any deficit we would ever have, and then some.”
You mean there’s money out there available but uncollected?
Silsby said his agency knows about most of the people who don’t file annual income tax forms. Not just knows about them, but knows who they are and where they are. The problem is that Maine Revenue Services doesn’t have the resources to collect these funds.
So, rather than redirecting resources to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid income taxes, the law-abiding tax-paying citizens are consistently asked to bear a higher tax burden to pay for government operations.
Let’s be clear. Maine knows who the scofflaws are but can’t afford to go after them so the rest of us just pay more.
Wrong.
If the Department of Human Services can effectively collect unpaid child support from deadbeat parents, the state ought to be immediately able to use the same procedures to collect unpaid income taxes from people we’ve already identified.
If Baldacci is looking for a revenue source, uncollected taxes is a good first step. But we have to do more than ponder the problem.
Maine has file cabinets full of reports written by committees that have been formed to study education, health care, transportation, jail overcrowding, economic development, housing. You name it and government has studied it. Sometimes more than once. And yet we are still grappling with many of these problems because, while thought and study are worthwhile, nothing ever gets done by thought alone. It takes action.
The problem of unpaid income tax has been studied. The Attorney General’s office has acknowledged we have to do more to enforce our tax laws, but we don’t because we can’t afford to.
Can we afford not to?
It would be a happy new year for Maine’s faithful taxpayers if the state resolved to go after tax cheats.
jmeyer@sunjournal.com
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