Your tax dollars at work

Miranda got a letter from the California Franchise Tax Board a couple of months ago. It said she'd failed to appear in court in the city of Tracy on a charge of reckless driving, and until she did show up, they were going to have her employer take money out of her wages and send it to them.

Sounds reasonable. Except for two things: she wasn't the driver in the auto accident that started this whole sorry chain of events; and the accident was seventeen years ago.

Seventeen years. Here in California the statute of limitations for most crimes -- most felonies -- is five years. You can commit burglary, shoplifting, grand theft, fraud, second-degree kidnapping, and assault and battery, and as long as you don't kill anyone or commit a sex crime, and as long as you keep it low-key enough to stay out of the "class A felony" category, the cops can't do a thing to you if they don't do it within five years.

But if you're in an auto accident, and your low-life boyfriend -- who was driving, but didn't see why the CHP had to know that -- takes your driver's license out of your purse and hands it to the CHP officer while they're loading you into the ambulance, you better take care of it right away, even if your boyfriend somehow forgets to tell you about it. Because seventeen years later, they'll be coming for you, or for the twenty bucks a month they can siphon out of your paycheck.

That's right. They put the bite on Miranda for about ten bucks every paycheck. The wheels of justice grind slowly but exceeding small. It cost them probably five bucks to dun her, and five bucks to process each payment, so the net gain for the state was probably zero. But that's nothing when justice is to be served.

So a few weeks ago Miranda took a day off work -- lost a day's wages -- to drive to Tracy and appear in court. The CHP officer, now retired, showed up too, and spoke right up, the good man: "Your honor, I can't remember anything from seventeen years ago!"

"Dismissed," said the judge. And that was that.

Except of course for the two- or three-week wait for the word to trickle through the Franchise Tax Board's bureaucracy. So Miranda's next paycheck got a bite, too. Today we finally got the word in writing that they didn't want any of her money any more.

And when will they send back the money they collected on the presumption that she was guilty (hey, wait a minute -- presumption of guilt?) Oh, soon; real soon; not more than a few months. And will she get interest on it? Oh please, stop, you're killing me.